


of poppies and pomegranate seeds

by AGlassRoseNeverFades



Category: Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types
Genre: Ableism, Allusions to Greek Mythology, Author is Just Making This Up as He Goes Along, Autistic Will Graham, But it's there, But that's unrelated to the unresolved daddy issues also in play I swear xD, Catatonic behavior, Coming of Age, D/s undertones, F/F, Hannibal May Be More of a Creep than Usual in This, Hannibal is still Hannibal, In many shapes and sizes, M/M, Maybe with hints of Daddy Kink as well, Often of the seemingly "casual" and "offhand" variety rather than blatant hate speech, Older Abigail Hobbs, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Praise Kink, Role Reversal AU, Special Agent Abigail Hobbs, Teen Will, Temporary non-verbalization, Trans Will Graham, Transphobia, murder family redux, sexual awakening
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2018-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-10 17:00:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 35,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12916290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AGlassRoseNeverFades/pseuds/AGlassRoseNeverFades
Summary: She’s nervous. That’s new. She never gets nervous, at least not about things like this. The behavioral profiler in her wants to examine this feeling, run her fingers over it like running one’s tongue over a toothache. No time for that now. The boy in the bed has her full attention at the moment, frail-looking in his hospital nightgown. He shouldn’t seem so frightening.“Will, I’m Special Agent Abigail Hobbs,” she introduces herself. “And this is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Do you remember us?”“I remember you.” Graham shifts, lifting his gaze higher to meet hers full-on. She gets the impression he doesn’t do this often. Abigail’s mother always warned her the most important moments in her life would come wrapped up in simple ones such as these, their potency drawn from the smallest of actions, and she believes it now, pinned in place by a teenager’s eyes like needles through a butterfly’s wings.“You’re the woman who killed my dad.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Teacups shatter in funny ways sometimes. Let’s explore another one of those best possible worlds together, shall we?

“Mr. Marlow was shot twice, jugulars and cartoids severed with near surgical precision. He would have died within minutes. Mrs. Marlow, on the other hand,” a click of the remote, and the projector changes over to the next slide. “Shot through the neck, but not fatally. The bullet misses every artery, leaving her paralyzed but not unconscious or unaware of what’s happening to her and around her. Now, what does that tell you?” Several hands shoot up in the air. She points to one.

“That she was the target. The husband was simply in the way and had to be disposed of quickly. His death was incidental to the unsub.”

_“Not_ incidental,” the woman in front of the projector corrects. “His death was necessary. We know the unsub was observing the house at least a week in advance of the murders, most likely longer, and could have easily chosen a night when Mr. Marlow wouldn’t be home until late to make his move. No, nothing about this crime was incidental.” From the corner of her eye, she sees her boss come into view in the doorway, hands clasped in front of him in observation, waiting. “Every detail of it was meticulously planned, down to the last minute.”

It is a good point to stop on, to give them all some food for thought, though it is not where she originally planned to end her piece. Wordlessly, she hands the remote back to the instructor, gesturing to the door with a short incline of her head to indicate why she’s cutting herself short. The other woman nods in understanding and turns back to her students. “Everyone, let’s all thank Agent Hobbs for her time today. If we’re enthusiastic enough, maybe she’ll even agree to grace us all with another visit same time next week,” Bloom adds with a playful smirk in her direction. Abigail throws her a wink in parting and a courteous nod to the students as they give applause.

“When did you tag the eighth?” she asks apropos of nothing as she and Jack march swiftly down the hall, easily guessing the reason he wanted her to cut it short.

“About three minutes before I walked into Alana’s classroom,” Crawford answers. “Elise Nichols. St. Cloud State on the Mississippi. Supposed to house sit for her parents over the weekend, feed their cat. Never made it home.” He ushers them into his office and picks up a girl’s portrait off his desk which he hands over to her.

Abigail looks at it, taking in the girl’s pretty, wind-chaffed face, her brown hair and blue eyes, just like all the others. Just like Abigail too when she was their age; she could have been friends with girls like these, in another time, in another life. Eight girls missing, seven presumed dead. _Eight._ It burns when she swallows. She pins Elise’s picture up on the board with the others.

“Let me just grab my go bag.”

“Katz went by your office. She has your go bag. You’re ready to go, so let’s go,” Jack says, turning on his heel with his own bag slung over his shoulder to head right back out the door they came through. Abigail follows.

*

Interviewing the parents is a sad refrain on the same old tune as always, one she’s become all too familiar with over the past several weeks. Sometimes they’re angry, emotional, sometimes resigned, sometimes desperate, sometimes hopeful, but always, always they are worried and afraid. The Nichols are no exception. Mrs. Nichols is leaning toward the resigned end of the spectrum, Mr. Nichols desperately hopeful.

When she asks to see their daughter’s room upstairs, Mr. Nichols accompanies her. Whatever he says fades into the background as she observes the cat pawing interestedly at the closed door, trying to get inside, her senses immediately on high alert. “Mr. Nichols, I’m going to need you to stay back,” she says, already pulling on her nitrile gloves, the authority in her voice making it less a request and more an order that must be unquestionably obeyed. Privately, she hopes she is being overly cautious, that her instincts are wrong, even as she clinically acknowledges that this could be exactly the breakthrough their investigation needs if her suspicions are correct.

She is rarely wrong. She is not wrong now.

Curiosity has gotten the better of not just the cat, and she feels Mr. Nichols' presence behind her once more. “Elise!” he chokes out, a disbelieving, almost ecstatic sound climbing up his throat. She throws an arm out before he can take another step forward, a rigid line that is stronger than it looks hidden within the sleeve of her dark blazer, stronger than most men would assume of a woman of her size. It halts him for a moment before he pushes back, confusedly but not aggressively, not yet understanding why she won’t allow him to continue forward to his daughter lying still in the bed.

“Mr. Nichols, I need you to leave the room,” she orders firmly, securing eye contact before pushing him back with gentle force. Understanding finally reaches his eyes as the hope there dies.

Once ERT arrives and Nichols and his wife are safely ensconced outside at an ambulance, Abigail returns to the scene upstairs where Katz, Zeller, and Price are already making their sweeps and taking samples. “Found antler velvet in two of the wounds,” Beverly says from her station at the side of the bed as she walks back into the room. “Like she was gored.”

“Deer and elk pin their prey,” Brian rejoins, taking another photograph. “Put all their weight on the antlers and try to suffocate them. That’s how they would kill a fox or coyote.”

“Elise Nichols was strangled and suffocated,” Crawford says, standing to one side while the forensics team does their work but still wholly present and in charge. “Ribs were broken.”

“Well, those are definitely hand prints that did the strangling,” Jimmy points out, using tweezers to gently pull back the lace of her nightgown just enough to show them in the light. Another photograph is snapped.

_“Human_ hand prints,” Brian adds with snark.

“I said there was antler velvet in the wounds. I didn’t say the deer put them there,” Beverly refutes.

Abigail hums thoughtfully. Crawford takes notice. “You’ve got something for me, Hobbs?”

“Antler velvet is rich in nutrients,” she tells them. “It promotes healing.”

“You think he was trying to _heal_ this girl?” Crawford asks skeptically.

“Maybe to his mind. Something like it, at least. Like an apology.”

“An apologetic psychopath,” Crawford says with a snort. “Is this her then? His golden ticket?” he asks, harking back to an analogy which had been made some time ago when they were speculating how the killer was choosing his victims and why.

“I don’t know. Could be,” Abigail suggests, puckering her lips at the sour feel of those words on her tongue. They don’t sit right. “No, likely not,” she corrects herself. “I mean, could be _if_ the reason he couldn’t do to her what he did to the others was an overwhelm of emotions, couldn’t put his panic—or his excitement, one or the other—back into the bottle, but this doesn’t feel like that. It would be sloppy if that was the case. A mess. He wouldn’t have put her back so carefully, almost… _tenderly._ Now I lay me down to sleep,” she mutters.

“He risked everything to tuck Elise Nichols back into bed,” Jack says, bouncing the idea back and forth with her now that they have a rhythm going. “A _sensitive_ psychopath,” he says now, pondering.

“Then maybe not really a psychopath at all but…something else.” Their joint analysis continues for a bit, until Crawford has to step out to take a call from one of his superiors.

“So…heard you and Alana Bloom were acting pretty cozy before you got reluctantly pulled away,” says Beverly.

Abigail snorts. “Hardly. I was giving a guest lecture to her students. Why? You jealous, Bev?”

“You know how I feel when you talk to other girls, babe,” Beverly play-flirts right back, batted eyelashes and all. Brian joins the game with an exaggerated sigh, and would probably be about to make a joke about how unfair it is that the two women on the team will flirt with each other but not with him, if not for Jack reentering the room right at that moment. The three of them double-down on their work immediately, exuding nothing but professionalism.

“Seriously,” Bev asks later as they’re packing everything up. “You finally about to make a move on Dr. Doe-Eyed and Dreamy or what, Hobbs?” Abigail sighs and deliberately doesn’t say anything.

“Come on, am I gonna have to liquor you up to get you to talk?”

“Only if you’re buying,” she responds immediately.

“Damn, I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“Sure did. I’m picking the bar this time,” says Abigail.

“Fine, but you’re gonna have to settle for the cheap stuff. It ain’t payday yet.”

*

Elsewhere in Minnesota, a woman hums tunelessly to a song she heard on the radio this morning, carefully stirring a pot of something on the stove. A boy, about eighteen, sits at the island countertop and unconsciously sways his foot to the rhythm of the same song, letting it tap periodically against the legs of the barstool. The only other sound aside from the bubbling of the stew is the scratch of his pencil on a sheaf of loose leaf paper resting at an angle in the pages of an open textbook.

The front door opens, and the woman stops humming, turning toward the sound of footsteps approaching with a smile. “You were out working late tonight,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry.” Her husband lays a perfunctory kiss on her mouth when she leans up for it, expression warming only when she can see it. She turns back to the stovetop and he comes around to the other side of the island, face softening as he curls a warm hand on his son’s shoulder. “Hey, poppy,” he greets, and lays another kiss at the crown of his forehead.

_“Garret,”_ his wife chides gently, still smiling, the type of tone she takes when she has to remind him not to rest his feet on the coffee table.

“What?” Garret asks, mouth stretching into a too-wide smile of his own. “It’s not…it’s not specific to just—” He spins around in place to look at his son. “You still like it when I call you poppy, right?”

The boy smiles in kind, adjusting his glasses, then looks away again and returns to his homework. AP Calculus, though to Garret it might as well be quantum time travel equations for how well he understands it. Gone are the days when his little princ— _his boy_ would turn to him for help with his homework. Gone are many of the days Garret Jacob Graham looks back on and treasures most.

“What are you making?” Garret asks his wife.

“Lamb stew,” she answers. “I used that cut you left out to thaw.” Unnoticed by either of them, focused on their tasks, Garret twitches, but something must still be showing on his face when she turns back to him again and asks, “Is something wrong?”

“No, no, it’s fine,” he assures her. “It’s fine. It’s just…I was planning to cook it for us tonight, that’s all.”

“You were late,” she reminds him.

“So I was,” he responds genially. His hands still want to twitch. Half a minute passes before he can’t take it anymore and crowds into her space, plucking the wooden spoon from her hand. She accepts this with little more than a huff, used to his ways by now. “How about you get started on the bread rolls while I take over here?” he says, as if it is a request.

He tastes it while she sets to the task of getting out the flour, butter, and other ingredients. It is adequate, and should only take a little extra work to make it right.

Mrs. Graham sets to work making dough on the other side of the island counter. She looks up at both members of her family and smiles serenely, and it’s apparent that she’s waited for them all to be home together before she asks, “Will, how is school going?”

The boy stops writing when he hears his name to blink up at her owlishly, appearing to need a moment to switch gears between numbers and speech before he can process what she’s just said. “It’s fine,” he says, tone flat.

“I spoke with some of your teachers at PTA today,” she says.

Will scrunches his face a bit as he looks at her. “It’s not fine?” he asks her quizzically.

“It is,” she says. “A few of them just expressed concern with how quiet and withdrawn you’ve been in class lately. Quiet even for you,” she adds when he seems about to snark something in response.

“But I’m not,” Will protests, at the exact same time that Garret asks without looking at him, “Is that true, pumpkin?” Will straightens on his stool.

“No,” he says to his father’s back. “No, sir,” he adds quickly.

“You’re not in trouble, baby,” his mother reassures him, patting him on the back of the hand. He startles a little, having forgotten her until he turns to face her again.

“I know,” he says. “Because it’s not true. I don’t know what those teachers are talking about. I’m the same as always. Maybe _that’s_ what their problem is. Everyone else is getting senioritis and acting like a bunch of kids with every day we get closer to graduation.”

“Maybe so,” his mom concedes. “But you’d tell us if anything was bothering you, right?”

_“Mom,”_ Will says, dragging the syllable out, the exasperated mantra of teenagers everywhere.

“Karen, the oven’s been preheating for awhile,” Garret points out.

“Aye, aye, captain, give me just a minute,” she says, giving a jaunty salute and giggling. She glances to Will with a look of fond amusement as if to convey, _‘Oh, your father.’_ Will’s lips twitch up into an honest smile, mostly at how silly she’s being.

“You know I don’t mean to fuss,” Karen says as she goes back to her kneading. “I’m just checking in. You’re difficult to read sometimes, you know.”

Will snorts. “That’s not true either. I’m an open book.”

“Oh, sure,” his mother says without looking up, barely refraining from an eye roll. “Where have I heard that before? Like father like son.”

Garret smiles as he continues staring down into the pot he’s stirring. Will stares ahead at his mother, eyes fixated on a smudge of flour on her forehead from her earlier salute, before he finally drags his focus back to the book of math equations in front of him.

Once the bread is in the oven, Karen leaves to wash up, declaring a rinse at the sink not enough after she spies her own reflection in the window.

“Will,” Garret says. The scratch of the pencil immediately stops again. “You have all weekend to work on that. Put it away and help me finish making dinner.”

After a long few seconds of silence, he hears the thump of the book closing behind him and being slid along the edge of the countertop out of the way.

“Bring me the paprika, would you, poppy?” he murmurs. Will goes to the spice rack and takes the jar to him.

“Thank you, sweetheart.” Garret slides an arm around the boy’s shoulders once he’s near enough and draws him into a half-hug while he continues stirring. He rubs his hand up and down his arm in an off-hand, almost distracted sort of way for a few more seconds before he releases him.

Will holds still throughout, waiting for his father’s arm to pull away completely before he finally slips back quietly just out of reach.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Hannibal is a social chameleon, Abigail gets a little sassy, and Will...poor baby's just trying to survive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> byk23 (Hannipenguin) made this [gorgeous cover art](https://aglassroseneverfades.tumblr.com/post/168246276748/of-poppies-and-pomegranate-seeds) when the first chapter came out, as well as some [fantastic manips](https://aglassroseneverfades.tumblr.com/post/168196453538/imagine-it) on the original post that sparked this idea, please check them out and give the artist lots of love! <3

“How many confessions so far?” asks their newest asset, a middle-aged man with dark sandy-colored hair and a Baltic accent.

“Dozens, last I checked,” Jack answers. “None of them had details until around mid-morning, when suddenly _all of them_ had details,” he continues, voice taking on an edge of irritation and weariness with the whole situation. “Some genius with Duluth PD shared a picture of Elise Nichols’ body with his friends. Freddie Lounds got ahold of it and ran it on Tattle-Crime.”

“If nothing else, you’ve got to admit she’s resourceful,” Abigail quips. Jack gives her a narrow, unimpressed look, which does nothing to flag her dry smile. One of them needs to have some levity about this, or else it’ll just fan the flames of her boss’s ire until he blows up about it later.

“Dr. Lecter, I’m hoping with the help of your expertise, we can shed some more light on how this cannibal is choosing his victims. Abigail and I believe that may be the key to catching him,” Crawford says, steering them back on point. Now that their first actual body has dropped, they have a little more to go on but it’s still not enough, so Jack is pulling out all the stops now by calling in an outside consultant for additional legwork. Dr. Hannibal Lecter comes to them well-qualified and on Alana’s recommendation, a former mentor of hers at Johns Hopkins.

The psychiatrist looks over the crime scene photos laid out before him and Abigail on Crawford’s desk. “I see no rage here,” he says. “Only regret.”

“We think to him the victims all represent one woman,” says Abigail, leaning forward to get a closer look at Elise again, so deceptively peaceful in repose.

“Could be a girlfriend or a wife,” Jack says, picking up the thread as he had done with this exact conversation before, this time now for Lecter’s benefit.

“Or just as easily be the girl who bags his groceries, or the ticketer at the movie theatre who smiled at him once,” she finishes, letting some of her frustration show. _‘Why do men always have to be such creeps?’_ she doesn’t ask, knowing Jack would understand what she means well enough not to take offense but Lecter may not, though as Alana’s friend she does doubt he’s the type.

Lecter delicately picks up the photograph Abigail had been looking at, the close-up on Elise’s face. “These girls, they are all of about the same age as well as being similar in appearance?” he asks. Both agents nod. “And there was no sign of sexual assault found in Miss Nichols’ autopsy?” he presses further.

“Correct. No DNA, no tearing, nor any of the other usual hallmarks,” Jack confirms. “All of them are college girls as well, freshman and sophomore years,” he adds, elaborating on the first answer.

The other man considers that carefully. Finally, with a soft frown and a delicate bob of the Adam’s apple as he swallows, he asks, “Have you considered the possibility that it may not be a romantic ideation the killer is pursuing with this mystery woman? His _love,_ for lack of a more appropriate term, may be more familial in nature.”

Jack and Abigail share a look with each other of equal surprise. “A daughter,” she says first, the pieces falling into place. “Most likely starting college next fall. _Dammit,_ Jack, Dr. Lecter’s right. It makes the most sense.” She could smack herself on the forehead for not seeing it before.

“Hell of a way to cope with the separation anxiety,” says Jack, shaking his head, looking even wearier than before. “Dr. Lecter, I can’t thank you enough for your help on this,” he says, galvanizing himself and rising from his chair to shake the man’s hand. Alana deserves their gratitude as well, Abigail thinks, for suggesting him to them in the first place. She shakes his hand as well.

“I only hope it will be enough to help you catch him in time, Agent Crawford, Agent Hobbs,” he says with a nod to each of them in turn.

“About that, Doctor,” Jack begins. There is a smile on his face now as it fully hits him that they finally have a more workable lead on this case. “One of our own, Beverly Katz, found a metal shred from a pipe threader on Elise Nichols’ clothing. We’re going back to Minnesota tomorrow to look into construction sites that use that particular kind of pipe, but your insight is going to help us narrow the field even further. I was wondering if you’d be willing to lend us that insight a little longer and accompany us?” Dr. Lecter agrees, and once the details are hashed out, he and Abigail leave Jack’s office at the same time and exit into the hallway together.

Abigail folds her hands in front of herself and rolls her shoulders to stretch her back a little after sitting for so long. “I’m grabbing a soda from the break room. Care to join me?” she offers.

“Certainly,” he says with a gracious nod. Alana really hadn’t been kidding about the manners thing, she muses. _Endearingly old-fashioned,_ she’d called it. Abigail supposes people have been into weirder things.

He declines when she grabs her Dr. Pepper out of the vending machine and offers to buy him something out of it as well. “I was sort of trying to reciprocate for the coffee earlier,” she admits. She’s genuinely almost as grateful for the extra cups he’d brought with his thermos as she is for his help with the profile. The stuff they brew in here is absolute swill and Starbucks is an expensive habit to maintain.

“I appreciate it, but it’s not necessary. I try to be careful what I put into my body, so this is all the caffeine I’ll be having today,” he says, holding his thermos aloft.

Figures as a doctor he’d feel that way. “Don’t judge,” she says, popping the cap off her soda with a guilty glance in his direction before taking a swig.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he tells her with a wink. “We all have our vices that make life worth living.”

“I’ll settle for bearable most days,” she quips back. It is refreshing to meet a new colleague and potential friend who can keep up the banter besides Katz. Brian tries, bless him, but he misses the mark a lot, and Jimmy’s also a good guy but their senses of humor don’t quite match up.

“I have a small confession to make,” Hannibal tells her. “I have been looking forward to meeting you for some time. Every time your name comes up in conversation, Alana speaks highly of you.”

“She does?” Abigail blurts, knowing there’s an annoyingly silly smile trying to reveal itself although she’s fighting it. “My name come up that often, huh?”

“Indeed it does,” he says, a knowing half-smirk on his face now that tells her she’s not pulling off the casual act as well as she thought. Oh hell, he’s going to be almost as bad as Bev if they work together long enough, she realizes. Maybe it is time she moves past the flirting she’s been comfortable with and actually asks the other woman out before the teasing starts coming from all sides.

She and Alana have been dancing around each other for long enough anyhow.

*

From upstairs, he can just make out the murmur of his mother’s voice still, her loud laughter which would almost be too much if they were in the same room together, but it is a good, hearty, cheerful kind of loud. He can tell by the cadence of it that she’s making some comment about the movie they’re watching that she thinks is very witty but probably isn’t, she being a few glasses of box wine into an enjoyable evening at home and therefore finding everything extraordinarily funnier than it actually is. She’s pleasant even when she’s tipsy, even if she does talk through movies too much.

He cannot hear his father’s response, if he makes one at all. He never does from up here. Garret is too soft-spoken and self-contained, a polar opposite to the woman he married in every conceivable way. He is likely not to have even touched his own drink more than a couple of times tonight, for appearance’s sake, because if he didn’t Karen would pout about having to indulge alone. Will notices these things. He doesn’t comment, but he notices.

It’s not so unusual for him to retreat upstairs rather than participate in movie nights. He’s not some moody teen who hides away often in his room as a tiny act of rebellion, he just values his time alone with his own thoughts and needs the space to sort himself out when he gets overwhelmed, gets overstimulated by too much noise and movement, too many voices and people. Karen knows this about him and doesn’t question it when he withdraws to bed early that evening. Garret watches him go until his feet disappear from view on the upstairs landing.

Once in his room, Will strips down to his boxers and pulls on over them his favorite night shirt, a much-faded and overlarge New Orleans Saints tee which practically swallows him whole and brushes down to his knees. It is threadbare and almost tattered in places, the black fabric dulled and bled out with age, the golden fleur-de-lis insignia cracked and peeling, a cheap prize won from a T-shirt cannon at a game that happened before he was even born. Will loves it more than just about anything else he owns.

The reason for it being his favorite has nothing to do with football (a sport he doesn’t follow and barely even knows the rules of) and everything to do with how soft and worn it is to the touch after years of washings and his own near-constant fondling and handling of it, long, slim fingers always twisting and fiddling at the hem. It’s very comfortable. His mother wore it while pregnant with him apparently—not his mother downstairs, who raised him and loved him as her own since he was ten, but the other one, the birth mother he never knew.

(He honestly can’t even remember her name. His father doesn’t speak of her. Painful memories, most would assume with pity in their eyes, but Will personally believes his father doesn’t remember her well either. He’d asked about her when he was little and gotten answers in the same bland, vague timbre of a weather report.)

(“A girl needs a mama,” one of his dad’s work buddies at the time, Hank, had told Garret sensibly, speaking with practiced ease around a chew of tobacco wedged against his gums, at a farewell barbecue they were invited to shortly before moving to Minnesota. “Teach her things you can’t. Hell, she needs a stable home too,” he’d added, beer sloshing as he gestured with the can pointedly. “Can’t expect her to grow up all proper and ladylike without no female influence in her life and you always pulling up the stakes to head whichever direction the wind blows neither.”)

(Before Minnesota, they’d moved around a lot, Garret accepting odd jobs at boatyards, scrapyards, construction sites, wherever was hiring with minimal fuss and paperwork across all sorts of state lines, steadily inching them further and further north over the years. He’d hummed thoughtfully at Hank’s suggestion and taken another sip of his own beer, giving nothing in response. A few months later, at another barbecue thrown by another new work buddy, he was introduced to the buddy’s wife’s friend, a recent divorcee. He and Karen were married by the same time that following year.)

Will shuts off his lights and lies back on the bed. He stares up at the ceiling, bare toes curling into the blanket for warmth, fingers curling into the night shirt for comfort as he stims in the same familiar old pattern, twisting and smoothing out and twisting again, _twist, pat, pat smooth, twist._ He does not close his eyes. _Twist, pat, pat._ He listens to the muffled sounds of Hollywood car explosions and ambiance music. _Twist._ His mother laughs uproariously at the unrealistic dialogue and narrative full of plot holes. _Pat, pat, twist._ His father says nothing as always. The music crescendos again. _Twist, twist, pat, pat, twist._ The music tapers off. His mother murmurs, could be something about more wine or snacks as it seems to be fading slightly into the general direction of the kitchen. _Pat, pat, twist, pat._

He has no idea when he had fallen asleep, but when he comes to—startling awake with only a small gasp—the house is silent and dark, no more light spilling under the crack beneath his door. Will disentangles his fingers from his shirt and sits up in bed, slow and careful in his movements to keep the mattress from groaning under his weight.

He stares ahead silently at the door, his eyes slowly adjusting to see by the starlight from his window. He stays like that for a long time, perfectly still except for his breathing, except for his heart still jackrabbiting madly from a nightmare he can’t fully recall, save for its shape and the shadows crowding around from all sides.

Several long minutes later, there is a sound like the house settling, like the creak of a floorboard directly outside his door. Will waits, listening intently past the imagined thrum of his own circulatory system in his ears, and a few moments later hears the soft _click_ of his parents’ bedroom door closing down the hall.

He stays up listening longer, but there are no more sounds that night. Eventually he lies back, fingers twisting into the Saints shirt once more, and closes his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your comments give me life and sustain me enough to keep this moving forward, please feed me! <3


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They meet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternate summary--author got overexcited and finished Chapter 3 **WAY** ahead of schedule. I don't know what's gotten into me lately, y'all. Please don't get too used to this, I don't want you to be too disappointed when I slide back into my usual slow updater habits. xD

There are agents scattered all about the grassy field, combing for further evidence which they will not find in the tall expanse of weeds and wildflowers, scurrying like the proverbial mice. The most thorough sweepers brush aside the flowers and grass to carefully examine the earth as if they are keen to quite literally turn over every rock, which puts him in mind more of the foolish nymphs in frantic search of their compatriot, the stolen Persephone, before her divine mother can discover her missing and come down upon them raining bitter tears, full of retribution and wrath.

Their Persephone is not lost at all in this case, save perhaps in the metaphorical sense, but mounted elegantly upon a crown of antlers in the center of the field where passing cars will have an excellent view of her presentation. The thundercloud of building fury emanating from Jack Crawford’s very being like an aura puts him more akin to Zeus than Demeter. It seems almost incongruent with the myth, for Zeus had been the one to grant his brother Hades permission to take the girl against her and her mother’s will—but then, it had been Jack Crawford who invited Hannibal Lecter to join his team and take part in their investigation in Minnesota, had it not?

And to think, he had almost stayed his hand and not gone out to cull young Miss Boyle from the rest of the herd last night. Had he not, he would have missed this very expression on Crawford’s face upon receiving his gift. That alone makes the sleepless hours spent putting it all together entirely worth it.

Although he is unquestionably curious to see how the FBI operates when it’s not kicking down doors, he is optimistic there will be plenty of chances in the future to witness them engaging in tamer routine investigative practices as long as he continues to prove himself useful to dear Uncle Jack. The opportunity to see how they would react to having their initial plans for the day shaken up—not to mention watch them investigate one of his own crime scenes firsthand—had been simply too good to pass up.

“Minneapolis homicide has already issued a statement,” Jack tells him as he steps forward to take a better look at his own handiwork, more accurately to make note of which members of the BSU comprise Jack Crawford’s elite core team and observe them at work as they are the ones he will be getting to know during his consultations. He has already met Agent Hobbs, favoring a leather jacket and dark chinos today over the more professional blazer and slacks in deference to the chill of autumn. Talking with her now is a similarly dressed woman of Korean and Jewish descent who must be the previously mentioned Beverly Katz. Also examining the body are two Caucasian males he believes he overheard being referred to by another in the field as Zeller and Price, though he does not yet know which is which.

“They’re calling him the Minnesota Shrike,” Jack answers when Hannibal asks what was said in the police statement. He looks more haggard and fed up than yesterday, being called out so early in the morning to analyze another scene so soon, and this one more gruesome than the last one. Hannibal is almost giddy with the knowledge. He knows that he must be careful, as this is how lesser killers are often caught when they fail to exercise proper caution around law enforcement. He will not be so gauche as to make such an amateur mistake.

“The Shrike is a perching bird,” says the older of the two men who may be Price or Zeller, joining in their conversation. “Impales mice and lizards on thorny branches and barbed wire. Rips their organs right out of their little bodies to put in a birdie pantry and eat them later. At its leisure.” What a delightful and apt description. This one must be a fun conversationalist at parties, Hannibal muses sincerely.

Jack appears to remember his manners at last and introduces the man—one Jimmy Price—as well as each of the others gathered around the body in turn. Hannibal has already chosen to forgive the man his lapse in light of the circumstances, but he appreciates now having a confirmed name to go with each face.

“Hell of a way to start your first day, huh, new guy?” says Katz, a sympathetic smile paired with her tone of wry teasing.

“Technically speaking, it is my second day,” he rejoins, to her amusement.

“I like this one, boss. Can we keep him?” she asks. Brian Zeller turns to her with a hand held to his chest in mock-offense.

“Ouch, Bev, I’m hurt! Does this mean I’m not your favorite anymore?”

“Enough,” says Crawford without raising his voice. He doesn’t have to, the seriousness of the tone enough to command all of their attention. “Hobbs, what have you got for me?” he asks. The others all take this as implicit permission and order to return to their own respective duties.

“Brian says her lungs were cut out while she was still alive,” she informs them first.

“I said _I think_ they were,” he amends. He immediately kowtows at the look Jack sends him. “But. I mean, I haven’t done a proper exam in the lab yet, but yeah. Pretty sure.”

“Sadism isn’t one of his usual signatures. It would be a massive deviation for our guy,” Abigail carries on as if she hadn’t been interrupted.

“So what are we thinking, is this her? The daughter?” Jack asks. He looks back at the corpse with a weary frown. “Then where did all his love go?” he mutters.

“I think we should consider the other probability,” Abigail responds. Jack and Hannibal both look to her. “Yesterday a picture of Elise Nichols’ body dotted with antler piercings goes viral, and we suddenly get flooded with calls from _lots_ of attention seekers wanting to make would-be confessions,” she points out, wry yet humorless.

“You think this was a copycat?” Jack questions, but it almost sounds more like a statement. He agrees with her, trusting her assessment readily, though it is apparent he’s not thrilled by the idea that there could be two killers now. Hannibal is also impressed by how quickly she came to the right conclusion. He enjoys getting to see someone so clever and competent in her field at work.

“The level of control and theatricality at this scene suggests an intelligent psychopath to me,” she says. An amusing and unsurprising estimation to make. “With no traceable motives or patterns,” she shrugs. “I hate to say it, Jack, but I think this guy may already be in the wind. He’s not likely to kill like this again, which means we won’t be able to catch him this way.”

“Or her!” Katz tosses out to them. She is significantly less put off by her employer’s withering glance than Zeller had been.

“Or her,” Hobbs caveats with a little smirk.

“Hey, you of all people should know better than to take what your own gender is capable of for granted,” says Zeller. At the number of arch looks this gets, particularly from Abigail, he hastens to elaborate, “Wait, no, I didn’t mean it like that! All I’m saying is there are tons of buff women out there more than capable of hefting a corpse and slamming it onto a deer head with enough force to impale it. You should see some of the ladies that go to my gym, look like they could break me in half without breaking a sweat.” This earns a few groans. “Oh, come on, I’m not being weird about it! In fact, I think it’s sexy. I’m a feminist!”

“Sure, just keep digging yourself that hole, Zee,” Katz tells him.

“Wha—I was defending your point!” he squawks before turning to the man on his left. “Jimmy, help me out here.”

“You’re on your own with this one, pal,” Price informs him without looking up from his own continued examination of the corpse.

Hannibal looks to Jack, curious as to why the other man has allowed these workplace shenanigans to carry on unimpeded for so long when he had been quick to quell them earlier. Jack is staring intently down at Cassandra Boyle’s body with a hard frown and has the look of a man who has a tough decision to make.

“Abigail,” he says at last, earning the woman’s undivided attention immediately. “I need everybody on forensics to stay here, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also stay on task with the Shrike, the _real_ one,” he tells her. “I want you and Dr. Lecter to move forward gathering files from those construction sites and interviewing persons of interest if you come across any. I’ll meet up with you once we’re wrapping up out here.”

“Got it,” she says without fuss, all business once more. “You came here in a rental, right?” she says to Lecter as the two of them make their way back to the line of cars parked alongside the road together.

“I did. Would you prefer to drive or should I?”

He hands the keys off at her request and slides into the passenger seat, feeling even lighter than before. He did not expect to get to have his cake and eat it too on the same day. Not only did he get to evaluate Hobbs with Crawford and the others at an actual crime scene this morning, he now also gets to observe her one-on-one on an assignment, this interesting young woman who is clearly Jack Crawford’s most valued profiler and also Alana Bloom’s soon-to-be paramour—the latter being certainly a higher compliment which speaks well to her character more than the former. Dr. Bloom is not one to suffer the attention of fools or blowhards.

All in all, an excellent start to what might turn out to be a rather exciting day, or at the very least, an educational one.

*

Serendipity proves to be more on Hannibal Lecter’s side today than he initially realized, for it is not long into their perusal of the cabinets at the first site before Abigail finds something which appears to catch her eye.

“A lady and a fella from the FBI, mm-hm,” says the administrative woman who left them to their task, flagrantly gossiping over the phone. “Going through drawers now and putting papers in boxes. _Yes,_ they are taking things. Didn’t say wh—” Abigail clears her throat to interrupt, quite rudely perhaps, but no ruder than the woman gossiping in front of them. The woman looks up in annoyance. “Look, Cheryl, I’ll call you back, alright?” she says before ending the call. “Yeah?” she addresses to Abigail.

“Got a personnel file on…Garret Jacob Graham?” Hobbs asks after checking the name on the union resignation letter held aloft in her hand. “I need an address.”

“It’ll be in that drawer there,” the woman says, pointing.

“What’s peculiar about Garret Jacob Graham?” Hannibal asks, taking the letter from her to look over it while Abigail opens the drawer indicated and pulls out the file in question.

“The lack of address,” she responds with a glib smile. “It’s not much, I know, but everybody else left one,” she adds, flipping through the folder until she finds it. “Oh good, that’s only a couple of minutes away.” In addition to the listed address which she takes down with her phone, she also finds inside a slightly yellowed three-sheet packet and hums with interest. “You know, legally you’re not required to hold onto employees’ resumes, but I appreciate that you did,” she remarks to the woman behind her, who appears uncertain as to whether or not she should take that as a compliment. “Here, take a look at this,” she says to Hannibal.

“An impressively long and varied history of work experience,” he says after a skimmed reading.

“All over the place too. Most of these jobs weren’t for very long. Guy must have been something of a drifter before he decided to settle in Bloomington, Minnesota, of all places.” There is almost an eager gleam to her eye, not necessarily that of a detective who thinks she’s found her culprit, but more that of a behavioral analyst pleased to find someone noteworthy enough to profile. “Does Graham have a daughter?” she turns to the secretary once more.

“Might have,” the woman answers, helpful as ever.

“She’d be eighteen or nineteen. About this tall. And she’d look like…umm, _well._ Sort of like me actually, I guess.”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep company with these people.” It really is such a shame he can’t collect this woman’s business card without risk of it coming back to him should she go missing.

The three of them then begin loading boxes into the trunk of the rental car, the secretary finally proving herself useful by helping, most likely in hopes of getting rid of them faster.

On the second trip between car and office, Hannibal tips one of the boxes over the railing while passing it to the woman, allowing papers to cascade everywhere and litter the ground at the base of the stairs. Abigail bends to help her pick them up and re-sort them, waving off his slow movement toward the steps as if to also assist with the clean-up. “Don’t worry about it, I got this.” Hannibal returns inside, ostensibly to prepare another box.

He picks up the corded phone receiver on the desk with a Kleenex tissue and dials the number he had memorized from Graham’s letter with his knuckle.

The phone rings twice. _“Hello?”_ someone answers, a clatter of pans and dishes in the background. Hannibal blinks, two things becoming clear to him at once—that the voice on the line is definitely young, most likely a teenager, and that it is also based on its pitch most likely male. One of these he might have expected, but not both together.

The Shrike’s daughter is an only child, of that much he had felt sure. He had also been _sure,_ after reviewing the man’s file, however, that Graham must be the one, had felt it intuitively himself and also believed Abigail’s investigative instincts to be sharper than even she gave herself credit for. Could they both have been wrong? That would be somewhat disappointing.

“Is this the home of Mr. Garret Jacob Graham?” he asks, deciding to follow through on his whim anyway. One never knows what might happen.

_“Maybe,”_ says the other, the kitchen noises fading as they presumably step out to talk somewhere quieter. Definitely a teenager, going by the churlish attitude. _“Who’s asking?”_

“I am calling to ascertain whether Mr. Graham is available for an at-home interview today,” he responds instead of answering. He can always plead ignorance of protocol to the agent outside if need be, so it would be best not to lie, but it would not be wise to outright say he is with the FBI and cause unnecessary alarm.

There is a curious pause, and then the boy asks, quieter, _“What kind of interview?”_

“I’m afraid it is of a personal nature,” he replies, glancing out the window. The women are still busy reorganizing the box he spilled.

_“What kind of interview?”_ the boy repeats, and all of Hannibal’s attention is immediately focused fully on him. The voice had tried, and failed, to hide a note of frantic urgency behind one of simple stubbornness. He is afraid. Hannibal smiles.

“Is your father home?” he asks.

The other breathes in sharply. _“No,”_ he answers, voice shaking, which is as good as a yes. He appears to realize this, and quickly hangs up.

Hannibal presses the redial button. He plays a foolish game in doing so and cannot say what even compels him to do it, except that he has not been so intrigued or entertained in a long time. Just who is this peculiar, knowing child, to be so instinctively fearful of a simple phone call?

The call picks up again after barely one ring. _“Look, I already told you, just stop call—”_ The voice on the other end stops speaking just as abruptly as it began. Hannibal can barely make out the sound of another voice, also male, catching the tail end of his question, _“…talking to, poppy?”_

_“Just a telemarketer, wants us to do a survey or something.”_ Hannibal smiles again at the lie, which could almost be truth if he didn’t know the boy to be confidently aware that he is no telemarketer. He does not hear the other man’s reply but surmises it must be a request for the phone when the boy then says, _“Actually, they asked specifically for Mom.”_ A desperate gambit to keep his father out of contact with the mysterious man on the phone. Hannibal admires the audacity of it. _“Here, Mom, it’s for you,”_ is the last he hears of the teen’s voice, already distant as he pulls the phone away from his face. A confused yet friendly feminine voice replaces it in greeting.

“Apologies, wrong number,” Hannibal responds smoothly before ending the call. Were he the sort, he would whistle as he calmly returns to the task expected of him.

Hobbs and the other woman return as he is making sure the final two boxes are packed and ready to go. “This it?” Hobbs asks, grabbing the second box. “Let’s get moving. After we talk to Graham, I want us to hit at least two more construction sites before Jack calls to check in.”

There is a spring to Hannibal’s step as they make their way back to the car. He relishes the novel feeling of having no idea what will happen next and would not miss it for anything.

He must remember to show his appreciation to Alana later for helping him get his foot in the door at the FBI through her recommendation. Without it, he might not have had the opportunity to meet such interesting new people.

*

It’s an ordinary enough looking house, two stories. There’s a truck and a sedan in the driveway, suggesting the folks are home. Abigail has already briefed her companion on some of the key points of house interviews, what sort of things not to say and such, and is turning partway in her seat to ask if he has any questions before they start when she catches movement out of the corner of her eye. She turns in time to see a blonde woman, a bit on the short and stocky side, appear through the slightly opened doorway. It takes a second longer to register that she is covered in blood and being _pushed_ out the door rather than moving of her own volition.

Abigail is out of the car almost before the front door has even closed again.

She stoops to the woman’s side first, realizing to her horror even as blood-soaked arms cling to her own that it is already too late for her. She is trying to speak in spite of the deep cut slashed across her throat, _“Hhhhh hwlllll.”_ Head lolling, eyes fixed not on Abigail but on the door behind her with the last of her dying clarity.

(Abigail has seen the same look before, though she doesn’t remember it now. Some part of her recognizes it, buried deep within her subconscious. When she was six, she ran ahead of her parents at the park and climbed onto the monkey bars meant for the big kids before they could stop her, wanting to impress them by showing that she could balance on top of it just like the gymnasts she saw on TV. She slipped and broke her arm, though it could have been far worse had she landed just wrongly enough. As she fell, she caught a glimpse of her mother’s face, the abject terror in her eyes as she realized she wouldn’t reach Abigail in time to catch her. That was the look.)

Rage and purpose are the only focal points driving Abigail Hobbs anymore as she lets the woman go, standing, and rears back just enough to kick in the door, _hard,_ gun already unholstered from her hip and pointed ahead in steady, unyielding hands. She will kill the man who did this. _She will kill this man._

There is incoherent shouting and the cacophonic clatter of things falling to the floor and breaking, the scrape of a chair against tile as someone stumbles into it, and she heads there. _“Garret Jacob Graham, FBI!”_ she adds to the noise. Were she able to hear past the pounding rush of blood in her ears, she would not recognize her own voice.

She comes into the room just as the man she’d glimpsed from the doorway before locks his arm around a struggling teenager, the other hand wielding a kitchen knife. “Stand down!” she orders, giving him this one chance even though some ugly, unholy instinct clawing within her breast demands blood.

The man does not listen, if he even hears her, already drawing the blade before she finishes against skin. She does not hesitate, opening fire into his shoulder to halt the action. The boy _(a boy? never mind that now)_ falls to the floor, and his father turns to him again, weapon raised, ignoring the wound in his shoulder.

The next shot finds his right temple.

She doesn’t offer his body or the brain matter spattered against the cabinets so much as a cursory glance, immediately across the room and on her knees to staunch the bleeding in his victim’s neck. He stares up at her, full of fear and pain. It’s never easy to see someone like this, but it’s especially hard on her this time. He’s so young, and it’s not fair, this wasn’t supposed to happen like this. She should have fucking shot first without giving the man warning, _to hell with the goddamn protocols._

The cut is smaller and shallower than the woman’s outside, so it’s possible for the boy to make it. No, fuck that, he _is_ going to make it. She’s not going to let him die. She’s determined not to let that happen.

It’s as if she somehow lends him her determination as well, his gaze reflecting it back up at her. The fear is still there but so is resolve, a will to keep on living. _Good,_ she thinks, a little proudly. He’ll need it.

Doctor Lecter comes into view and crouches beside them. She’d almost forgotten him amidst the chaos honestly. With careful maneuvering, they swap out hands so he can take over the task of staunching the wound. The distant sound of sirens approaching lets her know he’s already called for backup, just as she’d told him he should do if an emergency arose. Good. That’s good too.

She should get up now and do a sweep of the house, make sure there’s no one else dangerous or in need of help, which she doubts, before paramedics arrive. But she doesn’t want to leave the boy, Graham’s son. His attention has gone unfocused, wavering, doubtless from going into shock. She can’t leave him like this.

Lecter glances up from the teen and meets her eyes. “I have him, Abigail,” he assures her softly.

He was a trauma surgeon before he was a psychiatrist, she remembers. She can trust him. Abigail nods once, giving him a tiny smile which he returns, and with a final glance at the bleeding boy she stands to exit the kitchen and do her sweep, stepping over Garret’s body as she goes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Certain things just feel inevitable, like they were always meant to happen in (more or less) the same way. That feeling of inevitability will come up again a couple more times (you may be able to predict one of those, considering how this chapter started *cough cough hint hint*) but after that things will start changing in a VERY big way. You'll see. ;)


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Abigail makes her move with Alana, Hannibal totally ships it, and Will wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *rereads old comments/posts I made about not being "sure" Abigail/Alana was gonna be a thing I would get seriously invested in, laughs hysterically at past self* This is your captain speaking, all aboard the S.S. Abilana, there's no turning back now, we're in this for the long haul, folks, full steam ahead!! xD
> 
> Even though this ain't Fairy's Bride, here's an [art reference](https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2038/mars-and-venus) for you! I promise that unlike with that fic, it's definitely actually relevant to the chapter. ;P

“I wished…I wished in that moment I’d shot him faster,” Abigail confesses, pressing the phone tighter to the side of her face as if she can absorb it into her skin, allow the voice on the other side to sink in all the way to her bones and warm her up again from within.

_“You did absolutely everything you could and you saved a life today, Abigail,”_ Alana reminds her, not ungently. It is neither the first time she has saved someone nor the first time she has had to take a perp down using lethal force, so there is no logical reason for this time to feel any differently to Abigail, and she says so to the psychiatrist.

_“We can’t always predict how things will affect us, no matter how much or how little we believe our prior experiences have shaped our responses. Logic has little to do with it, I’m afraid.”_

Abigail nods. She knows this already, of course. She knows. “He looked so small, Alana,” she says, almost a whisper, and that’s also illogical; she and the boy are of roughly the same height. She knows Alana will know what she means though. “Reminded me of being a kid, you know, poking around in the backyard and finding this tiny baby bird on the ground. I wanted to swaddle him up delicately in a blanket and place him back in his nest.” A soft breeze picks up and scatters the crumbling red and gold-brown foliage of dried leaves across the Grahams’ lawn, a lawn that will never again be raked or tended by Graham hands. “Except there is no nest to put him back into.”

_“I’ll help him find a new one,”_ Alana promises her. She has already accepted the FBI’s request to oversee the Graham boy’s psychiatric care as soon as he is stable enough to be transferred from the local hospital to Port Haven Psychiatric in Baltimore. Abigail had leapt at the excuse Jack handed her, knowingly or not, to be the one to call and ask her on their behalf, eager to be out of the stifling air of the house and to have a friendly and familiar voice to latch onto, Katz and the others on their regular team still being preoccupied with the Boyle girl. She hadn’t meant for it to turn into an impromptu therapy session of her own, however, and apologizes to the other woman for it.

_“There is nothing wrong in seeking comfort and support from a friend,”_ Alana admonishes more firmly than she might have expected.

“Is that what we are? Friends?” Abigail asks with a hint of light teasing. If she’s flirting to deflect a little from their current topic, well, she knows she’ll be forgiven for it anyway.

The other woman makes a noise which sounds adorably close to a sputter. _“Is this really something you want to be discussing_ now, _over the phone?”_ she asks, a bit strained.

“No, you’re right. Over dinner sounds like a much more inviting prospect.” For a moment she fears she may have been too bold, the pause on the other end going on for a little longer than her nerves can handle.

_“Dinner sounds perfect.”_ Murmured warmly against her ear like that, it feels deliciously almost like a purr. Abigail shivers. _“Let me know when you’re on your way back and we’ll make arrangements.”_ She’s sure she isn’t meant to find the way Alana’s voice curls around those simple words as sexy as she does.

“I will,” she assures, hoping she sounds just as smooth and confident and not too much like she’s seconds away from squeeing in victory and excitement. On the bright side, she thinks she may not be the only one.

_“And Abigail,”_ Bloom adds, the flirtatious note not entirely dissipated but giving way a bit to the more supportive one once more. _“You can talk to me about things like this anytime you want, in a friendly or…otherwise personal capacity, but seeing someone about what happened today in a therapeutic capacity wouldn’t go remiss either. Just, uh, not with me,”_ she laughs. _“Hannibal would be a good fit, especially since he was there.”_

“Why, Dr. Bloom, are you suggesting you wouldn’t be capable of maintaining a professional distance as my therapist?” she teases again. She hasn’t seen Dr. Lecter since he climbed into the back of that ambulance a few hours ago, and it had taken all of her willpower and a firm internalized reminder of her own professionalism and the fact that she was still needed at the scene to keep her from following suit.

_“Well, I certainly wasn’t planning on keeping one,”_ Alana quips back. Abigail can hear the smile in her voice and secretly hopes there may be a light blush there too at her own boldness, as there certainly had been one on her own face as soon as she brought up dinner.

“I’ll think about asking him when I see him,” she says in response to the suggestion, wanting to make it clear that she is taking it seriously and not just deflecting again.

She taps the phone lightly against her lips in contemplation after they hang up, unable to keep another smile at bay in spite of everything else that’s happened, now that she has something to look forward to once she gets back.

*

This is not, as Americans are often fond of saying, Hannibal’s first rodeo. He has checked patients who had no one else available to help them into hospitals before, after drug overdoses, suicide attempts, and various other assorted emergencies. He is familiar with the routine of paperwork, questions about insurance, and quietly voiced negotiations at the administrative desk, both at this end and somewhat in passing from the other side during his tenure as a surgeon. He is not wholly prepared, however, for the quagmire of sorting it all for an individual who is not officially under his care, nor the receptionist’s reticence when he recites the identification number on the driver’s license he found in the boy’s wallet only to be told someone else already exists in the system with that ID—this, despite his repeated assurances to her that despite the two very different names, they are in fact the same person. Her bafflement with this concept is, in itself, baffling to him.

He had considered the curious fact that it was a presumably teenaged boy’s voice who answered the phone during the ride to the Graham household and come to a select number of likely possible conclusions. The small “F” on his license where one might have naturally assumed an “M” would be had confirmed the likeliest of all of them. Noticing when he checks again that the clear plastic sleeve it is housed in is ever so slightly bulged, he removes the card and discovers to his immediate satisfaction that there is another behind it, older and bearing the name the receptionist is in such a dither over. He passes them both over to her and watches amusedly as the woman turns an alarming shade of puce.

“Oh, _oh,_ he’s a, I mean _she_ …no, wait, um…that is—” She stops herself, clears her throat, and tabulates the necessary information into her computer silently after that. Her honest embarrassment with her own reaction is just gratifying enough that he might consider not taking her business card after all. It is still a possibility depending on how she continues to comport herself over the next few minutes.

“So, um, this is the name that should go on the door?” she asks, tapping the more recent card with her pressed-on fingernail. Hannibal affirms, and within short order “GRAHAM, WILLIAM” is printed onto a strip and adhered to the nameplate under the room number. Hannibal has already agreed to cover the additional cost of a private room, feeling it would be for the best if young Graham wakes in a room not overcrowded with numerous strangers. He will not be thanked for it nor does he wish to be. He considers it a basic human decency, one he can easily afford with no trouble, and William Graham is more or less his charge in this moment until the FBI intervenes directly.

He wonders if the young man goes by Will, or one of the other obvious nicknames available. It is unlikely even with it being the name he has chosen for himself that he prefers to stick with something so formal as William. He also finds Will a fitting name for someone who would act in defiance of his own father and a stranger’s potential machinations in whatever small way he can. Hannibal has always been unashamedly fond of puns.

He will deal with the matter of the phone call and how much Will may or may not remember in due time. It does not overly concern him. The worst they can charge him with if they are unforgiving of his “slip up” is obstruction of justice and he highly doubts Crawford would wish to take it that far. The actual worst case scenario would be Crawford’s loss of faith in him as a consultant and potential removal from the team as a result, which would be disappointing not the least because it would paint him as an incompetent, but also not so damaging that the loss of face would be irrecoverable. A lesson in humility he will learn from and accept gracefully if it even comes to that.

Eventually they allow Hannibal into the room. The boy is in stable condition but still not conscious yet. Hannibal could leave but settles into a chair at his bedside instead, prepared to stay until visiting hours are over if necessary. He is not a man prone to guilt for his own actions or pity for others, but it can perhaps be said that he owes Will Graham this much, even if he does not wake up today. Graham deserves to have someone to keep vigil over him at least, and there is no one else.

Hannibal reaches into the shoulder bag he brought with him for the trip and pulls out a travel sketchbook. While it is still fresh in his mind’s eye today, he would like to capture on paper the intriguing expression he witnessed on Hobbs’ face as she kicked in the door to the Graham house this morning.

Determination had been present but so had fury, a sort of wild ferocity, an image of the righteous seeking justice not merely for its own sake but in vengeance for the ten women who fell in Garret Jacob Graham’s bloody wake. He saw her in that moment as an aspect of war, an avatar of untamed Ares who saw the world of mortals through a red-tinted haze.

It would be more traditional to draw her as Athena, a goddess of the same pantheon who also presides over war, but Hannibal is no strict traditionalist. Though the two shots fired had been quick and efficient, that did not fool him into believing her parallel was with tempered and strategic Athena, who presided over war because it was necessary but bore no love for it. That bloodthirst craving for violence from the moment Hobbs crossed the threshold could only match the goddess’s fiery and wrathful brother.

Impossible, of course, to distinguish satisfactorily on paper when both god and goddess favor the same feathered helmet and spear in their depictions, so to more clearly make the distinction in his next sketch, he chooses to take inspiration from Antonio Canova’s statue of Mars and Venus. Hannibal wonders if it would be premature to model Aphrodite after Alana.

These are only rough early drafts, something to occupy him until his return to Baltimore where he can take his time with the finalized works. As such, it is not long before he is finished for the time being and finds his gaze once more pulled over to the boy sleeping in bed. Hannibal muses to himself quietly as he watches the steady rise and fall of the boy’s chest.

If he is of the mindset today to cast people he knows as Hellenic figures, then aesthetically Will Graham would make for a captivating Ganymede.

Hannibal takes up his pencil again. With his life model near at hand, he has the luxury of looking up periodically so he can capture in finer detail the bow-shaped mouth, the flutter of long eyelashes, the short, dark hair which is long enough yet to frame a sweet face with soft, tempting curls.

Sweet in form, but not in temperament if the single conversation they’ve had is an encapsulation of the whole. He cannot wait to see this dichotomy in action up close, to discover firsthand if that face is as lovely in bitterness and suffering as it is in the oblivious peace of repose. He wants to know how much the boy sees and understands, how it might paint his dreams.

He did not expect to find himself curious about the Shrike’s child outside of that role, but he is wholly interested in getting to know Will Graham.

*

It’s getting dark, the twilight of dusk falling in a hush over the closely knit trees, no sounds in the forest but the creak and sway of their limbs in the wind, and the brush of leaves and snapping twigs under a hoofed foot.

The stag is proud and graceful, taller than anything he or his father have ever taken down in a spray of buckshot, its antlers as twining and black as the shadows of the tree limbs. Its breath leaves its nostrils in a fine, warm mist. Will lowers his rifle, but the vision is no less clear even without the aid of its scope.

It lowers the front half of its body into an attack stance, prepared to charge, but he is not afraid of it. The wind ruffles its fur which he sees now isn’t only fur, tapering freely into raven feathers the color of omen.

He blinks, and the stag is gone. The trees are gone as well, replaced by a thicket of antlers suspended in inky blackness and the smell of dust after it has been struck by a crackle of lightning. Despite the lack of walls and creaking floorboard underneath, he recognizes it as his dad’s cabin.

Garret sits in a spindly wooden chair with his back to him. He does not feel or see himself moving, but in the next moment he is standing next to his father’s chair. The man turns in his seat to look up at him, his eyes milky white. No longer in profile, Will can see the exit wound gaping wide, the size of a grapefruit, dripping grey matter and silvery black ooze.

_“See?”_ his father asks, his hand frozen in a doll-like pantomime of reaching for his but making no move to cross those scant inches between their fingertips.

Will startles awake, the erratic beep of a monitor beside him jarring his already sensitive nerves. Someone bustles in, voices, _tell the doctors he’s awake,_ a hand on his shoulder. Will jumps and the hand’s owner shushes him, a nurse. “It’s okay. Poor thing, I think you were having a bad dream.” The moon is shining over the nurse’s shoulder. He doesn’t tell her this is the bad dream. He doesn’t tell her every time he wakes up is the bad dream.

He doesn’t ask why he’s in a hospital room, alive. He doesn’t ask where his parents are. He doesn’t say anything at all. He falls back against the pillows and tries to be somewhere else instead, but the only place his mind wants to go is back into the unlit antler room. He shies away from that as well and rests in some liminal space between there and the waking world, staring off blankly without moving, and doesn’t notice the look the nurse is giving him now.

He sits there still with the same shuttered expression even when a doctor arrives to tell him about his current condition, the procedures done to stop him from bleeding out in his family’s kitchen, how long he’s been unconscious here, where he’ll be transferred next most likely come morning, it’s all very informative and helpful and polite. The doctor seems very annoyed to be going to all this effort— _and be extra understanding and accommodating in their bedside manner, on a nightshift no less!_ —only to be totally ignored by some silent, insensate teen when they clearly have better things to be doing.

Right as they seem about to leave, Will turns his head fractionally in the doctor’s vague direction and asks without inflection, “Are my parents around?” He knows they are not. The doctor clearly knows just enough to at least be discomfited by the question, or is perhaps simply unnerved a little by Will’s own seemingly detached demeanor. Will turns his head back and doesn’t bother to actually listen to whatever half-assed answer they give.

He continues to sit in more or less the same position and stare off at the same blank wall long past the point when the moon has gone down and the sun has risen in its place, and is still sitting like that when another figure walks in, this one in a dark, smart looking overcoat buttoned over magenta leggings and chunky boots.

His visitor is speaking, but tuning in and actually reacting like a human being would, while he’s actually feeling more inclined to do so now, is harder than it was earlier after so many catatonic hours. The doctor last night being only the latest in a long line of many examples, Will knows from experience and the very empathy they lack that most “normal” people only have so much patience which tends to run dry rather quickly when they think he’s “willfully” ignoring them, so he puts all the energy he can into actually listening.

“…but you were pretty difficult to track down, Mr. Graham.”

“What?” Will blinks rapidly and half-twitches in place, surprised to the point of startled by the sound of his own voice after so long without it, accidentally giving the impression of a dreamer now suddenly awake. His mom had commented once that she felt bad sometimes for “snapping him out of his daydreams” when she talked to him like this, and she was right to call it that half the time; other times, like this one, it would be more akin to the final hypnic jerk breaking him out of a state like sleep paralysis, aware and conscious of his surroundings but unable to respond to them as he had either forgotten how to or that he needed to, often both. That’s a very weird thing to try to explain to a neurotypical though and tends to freak a lot of them out unduly, so in eight years of living together he never once corrected her assumption.

The woman gives him a sympathetic-looking smile and says, “Sorry, I’ve been babbling. I should’ve taken into consideration that you might still be in shock.”

“I’m not in shock.” That’s true, as far as he can tell. “I just wasn’t listening.” He cringes as soon as the words are out of his mouth, immediately realizing how they must sound. “N-not on purpose, I mean though, sorry. I didn’t notice you come in.” A necessary lie. It would be _rude_ if he’d noticed and still not been listening, as if he could somehow help it. “I was just…thinking.” Also a lie, he’s pretty sure he wasn’t thinking at all, not on any conscious level at least, but again it’s easier—and to most allistics _politer,_ for some reason—to go with the daydreaming thing than actually bother explaining.

The woman bobs her head understandingly, her curly red hair swaying a little with the motion. Will wants to joke that _no one_ could miss her walking in with hair like that, but that would ruin his carefully crafted lie and also probably be one of those “rude” things he’s not supposed to say to strangers who don’t get his humor. “No one can blame you for that. What happened, it’s a lot to digest.” Her eyes and mouth tighten as though she too has now said something accidentally inappropriate, but the look passes quickly and she moves past it without comment. “I imagine you have a lot of questions too.”

Will has fewer of those now than he does answers he wishes he didn’t. “Who are you?” feels safe enough to ask.

“My name is Freddie Lounds,” she answers, rather refreshingly not miffed about the fact that she has to introduce herself twice. “I won’t insult you by tiptoeing around why I’m here.” Also refreshing. “I write for Tattle-Crime.com, and I’d like to tell your side of the story. Your dad…I don’t know how much you’ve been told or figured out on your own yet, but there’s no gentle way to say it. He abducted and murdered eight girls around your age. They’re calling him the Minnesota Shrike.”

Will swallows and looks away from her, not sure what, if anything, he can or should respond to that with. “You’re a reporter?” he mutters unnecessarily for something to say.

Lounds takes a few steps closer to his bed. “Believe me when I say I understand that this is probably the last thing you want to be thinking about, but this is a very critical time for you. If you speak out now, you can get ahead of a lot of the speculation that’s going to start circulating about you and how much you knew sooner rather than later.” She has the grace—or the guile—not to voice any speculations of her own or fish too obviously for confirmation of any of them.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.” He’s pretty sure he doesn’t need her to, but he says it anyway, indirectly seeking clarification.

She has that look now he’s gotten familiar with seeing on a variety of faces, trying to think of the best possible way to say what she’s thinking without offending.

“Say it the offensive way,” he tells her wryly. She smirks in return. He thinks, somehow, her respect for him might have just gone up a notch.

“The girls looked like you,” she tells him as bluntly as he requested. “Or, how I imagine you must have looked in the not so distant past.”

“Ah.” Even having it confirmed, it’s impossible not to look down and pick at the blanket pulled around his waist as he might with his sadly absent Saints shirt. It’s too coarse and the wrong material, wrong texture. He stops picking at it soon after.

“I’m very good at my job,” she says in a way that seems like she wants to be reassuring. He knows she’s being manipulative but it’s also definitely at least somewhat sincere. “The other news outlets haven’t caught on yet, though it’s only a matter of time. They’re working with outdated details at the moment. That’s what I meant earlier when I said you were hard to find, I’m not sure if you caught that part or not. I, on the other hand, did some independent digging of my own and realized everyone else was barking up the wrong tree by reporting on the rather _cutely_ named Hannah Cricket Graham.” She seems rather proud of herself for her discovery.

Will’s reaction is caught between a wince and an amused snort. “Yeah, that’s, um…” He mumbles something embarrassed and unintelligible about Judy Garland and coughs. “FYI, you, uh, should try not to do that in the future. Namedrop a trans person’s birth name like that. We find it rude, sometimes even upsetting. _I’m fine,”_ he reassures quickly, seeing the change steal over her face. He would never admit it aloud to any of them, but the expressions cis folks make when they realize they’ve said something misgendering to him on accident almost never fails to be entertaining. It’s also annoying, and he doesn’t want them mistaking his brief amusement to mean it’s okay. “We call it deadnaming though, and it’s…it’s not really nice.”

“I’m sorry.” She seems not used to saying that and meaning it, which is definitely a tick in the ‘Should Not Trust This Person’ column, but it also makes him appreciate it all the more. So, even though he doesn’t think he’ll do anything with it, he takes her card when she offers it to him and promises he’ll think about what she said.

“I should go now, before the hospital staff figures out I’m not really your aunt and kicks my ass to the curb.” He laughs. It hurts to laugh, but of course she can’t see the pain and grins in kind. “Just take some time to mull it over,” she says again, and exits just as confidently as she entered.

Will leans back against his pillows once more and plays idly with the card in his hands, spinning it, slapping and pulling it lightly across his fingers, bending and folding it out of shape without creasing it, and easily slips quietly back into the privacy of his own thoughts. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Hannah_ Graham, hannigram, get it?? ;D I'll...I'll see myself out.
> 
> This isn't the last time I'll make terrible punny references to it though. Sometimes for plot reasons. Don't worry, Will's a lot like me in that he's actually pretty chill about mentions of his birth name as long as no one is directly _calling_ him that. (Just please don't ever assume anything I say about Will or myself should be taken as a blanket statement about all trans or autistic folks. Stuff like that varies from person to person. Should be obvious, right? Right.)


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal gets his wish of getting to properly "meet" Will Graham at last. He may be a bit more besotted (and spooked) already than he cares to admit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have a pet theory for why our grown-up, show-canon Will Graham, Mr. "I'm More Scared Of Myself And What I Might Be Capable Of Than Of Things That Go Bump In The Night," puts up that gruff, "unlikable," grumpy hermit exterior to keep people at bay and is hardly even successful at that. (Seriously, name one person on the show aside from Freddie Lounds who genuinely _dislikes_ Will from the start. I'll wait.)
> 
> Instead of just telling you here, I'll let Hannibal express in his own words his impression of a teenaged Will who hasn't learned to don that particular suit of armor just yet. ;)

The psychiatrist they assign him to is nice. She has kind, pretty eyes and a gentle sort of focus that makes her not as overwhelming to be in a room with as some other doctors he’s met. And even though it’s not her area, as she explains, she’s already picked up his records from the gender therapist back in Minnesota so she can continue writing him the same testosterone prescription, which is an extra step above the amount of consideration he expected of anyone.

“Of course, if you want to keep seeing a specialist here as well, I can arrange that.” Will shakes his head. The only reason he needed one before in the first place was to be allowed to start taking T as a minor. He has no interest in allowing more than one doctor to go poking around in his head at a time. His headspace is often overcrowded enough as it is.

“I hope I did alright guessing your sizes,” Dr. Bloom continues, indicating the shopping bags of clothes she brought in with her. “I have four brothers, so that really helped in my favor.”

“That’s a lot,” Will says because he’s pretty sure that’s the response she’d be used to getting.

“Tell me about it,” she quips, encouraging the increased engagement from him without being too pushy for it, which is exactly the kind of encouragement he responds well to.

“Bet you had to help take care of them from a young age, even the older ones. Might even be why you got into a form of caregiving as a career. It’s what you know and you’re already good at it.”

“You might be right,” she says, smiling the way people do when he’s said something insightful enough to make them curious but not frightened or repulsed just yet. He dials it back.

“People used to ask me if I’d babysit their kids, since I was like _twelve,”_ he scoffs. “As if I’d know how to keep someone else’s kids alive for a few hours, then or now. I need alarms just to remind myself to eat if Mom’s not around to…to remind me.” He’s glad he hasn’t been looking at her this whole time, staring blankly off at the floor to her left instead. He doesn’t want to know what face she just made; he can feel his own, the change barely perceptible but still there for anyone looking as closely as she probably is to notice, and that’s bad enough.

To distract them both, he grabs the nearest bag at hand and starts rifling through it, murmuring vaguely grateful and encouraging noises at what he finds.

“You’re welcome,” Bloom replies and tactfully changes gears back to the gifts she brought. “We can return anything you don’t like and exchange whatever doesn’t fit. I also brought you some music and some iTunes gift cards for it,” she says, resting a small stack of them with an iPod on the bedside table. Will didn’t even know they still made iPods and wonders if it’s an old one of hers. He would respectfully decline if he wasn’t trying so hard now to figure out why she comes bearing so many presents, fairly certain that’s not standard practice for most psychiatrists.

His fingers dig— _ironically,_ he thinks—into the next article at hand, a thin, cotton undershirt meant for sleeping that’s soft but not _soft enough_ once the answer occurs to him, a tiny, distressed noise breaking past his lips before he’s aware of it.

“Will?” Alana questions, voice soft with concern.

“Th-this is, this is real nice of you, to give me all this stuff since I don’t…I don’t _have_ …” He sucks in a sharp breath and ducks his head down, face scrunched hideously against the coming tears and chin tucked against his chest, hand still squeezing onto the not-good-enough shirt like it’s a lifeline, completely mortified by his own reaction but powerless to stop it now that it’s in motion. “Are they going to take away everything be-because of what my dad did?”

Alana reaches slowly to telegraph her intentions and rests her hand gently over his fist clenched around the shirt. “I honestly don’t know,” she says. “What I can tell you is that the FBI will take some time cataloguing everything in the house and any other properties, looking for evidence.”

“And?” He can tell by the tone of her voice that there’s more. She looks reluctant and sympathetic, but presses on.

“The families of the other victims have a right to file for what’s called a wrongful death suit. To pay those out, it’s likely most of your parents’ assets will be liquidated to cover the cost.”

“But that’s just the expensive stuff like the house, the cars, the cabin, maybe the TVs or whatever too, but not…not the stuff that’s not going to make them any money, right?”

“Certain items like pictures and purely sentimental keepsakes should just be archived for awhile until you can petition for them to be released back to you, which I’ll help you with when the time comes,” she reassures.

“And maybe, um, stuff like my own clothes? Not that these aren’t great, it’s just…” He trails off, not really comfortable admitting he’s been ready to cry over such a small, specific thing.

“I’m sure we can manage that too,” she says with a small smile. “It might take a few months though, so I’m hoping until then these will at least work better for you than staying in a hospital gown the whole time,” she jokes.

“Definitely,” he agrees, wiping his eyes, a little relieved even if the thought of _months_ is still kind of painful and overwhelming, also grateful that she’s trying to inject humor to make him feel better and not to make fun of him. “Sorry, I must seem pathetic,” he says, trying to smile back a little as though he too is joking. “My parents are dead and I’m just freaking out about…stuff. _Things.”_

“I don’t think that’s pathetic at all. Your entire world has just been turned upside down. When that happens, we try to seek comfort in reaching for what’s familiar.” She pauses, considering whether or not to voice what else she’s thinking. “We also might…sublimate bigger feelings, the losses we’re not ready to process yet, into smaller ones we can deal with.”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure I really am just that upset about my stuff.” It’s a little easier to make the smile come this time. She smiles back and finally releases the light grip on the back of his hand. It’s surprising if he thinks about it that he even allowed it to stay for so long.

*

“Did he give you any sense that he was hiding something?” Crawford asks later as the four of them—himself, Alana, Hannibal, and Abigail—sit in his office to discuss the recently woken Graham.

“Not so much as a sense of what he’s hiding from, namely his grief,” Alana answers. “More than that, I can’t say yet.”

Jack hums, dissatisfied. “He must know something. We need to ask him about the other girls’ bodies.”

“Jack,” Bloom protests in shocked disapproval. “Not yet.”

“I have seven families breathing down my neck about this. I need to be able to give them some kind of closure.”

“We already know exactly what he did with those girls, Jack,” Abigail points out pragmatically.

“Well, he couldn’t have eaten every part of them,” Jack points out right back, frustrated.

“That’s not necessarily true,” says Hannibal.

“The boy knows something,” Crawford repeats. “I can feel it.”

“Well, bullying him for the answers now isn’t going to help,” says Bloom.

“I want you two to interview him next,” Crawford continues as though he hasn’t heard her, indicating Lecter and Hobbs.

“Me?” Abigail asks, hoping the alarm isn’t too apparent in her voice as she straightens in her seat. “Are you really sure that’s a good idea? He may not want to talk to me, considering.”

“I agree,” says Alana, shooting the other woman a half-apologetic smile.

“You’re my best field agent, Hobbs. I can’t send one of the lab techs on this. And I’d like Dr. Lecter there as well so I can get another psychiatric opinion on Graham’s mental state. No offense, Dr. Bloom.”

“None taken, but Jack, you’re going to overwhelm him if you push this soon,” Alana reiterates.

“Dr. Lecter, what’s your opinion on this?” he asks. That does seem to rile Alana’s ire a bit.

“As I have not had the pleasure of speaking with Will Graham myself as of yet, I can have no opinion,” the other psychiatrist replies. “From what Dr. Bloom has already mentioned, however, he seems to be a resilient young man who can at least to some extent pull himself together again emotionally after only relatively short and healthy outbursts, and even remains focused on practical tasks and questions in the midst of that pain.”

“Speaking of, would you say he could have perhaps been a bit suspiciously practical?” Jack asks, addressing Alana once more. “Maybe a little too quick to recover from his, uh, outburst?”

“Not at all,” Alana replies, wearing her neutral face which Abigail knows means she is especially displeased now. “In fact, it was very apparent to me that he was still bothered but didn’t want me to see it.” She pauses, her face softening a touch as she thinks back to it. “And oddly, it didn’t seem as though he was being defensively guarded, which would be not only expected but even a bit warranted, but more as though he was trying not to worry me. I haven’t known him long at all but…I think Will Graham may be the kind of person who tries to minimize his impact on others, prioritizes their emotional needs more than the average person would for a stranger.”

“So now you’re telling me he’s some kind of altruist?” Jack questions, clearly skeptical. Abigail hates to admit that this doesn’t exactly ring true to her either, but she trusts Alana’s judgment enough to know there’s at least something to it. They simply don’t know enough about Will Graham yet to be able to guess what it is they might be missing.

“Abused children often form habits of appeasement,” she feels compelled to point out, knowing her boss will have an easier time swallowing that than whatever he’s reading into Alana’s statement. She’s proven correct by the short nod he gives as he considers that as well.

“Shall we then?” Lecter asks her, rebuttoning his jacket as he rises.

“In a minute,” Jack says. “I’d like to speak with Abigail alone if I could have just a moment, doctors?” Both Hannibal and Alana leave the room to allow them space. Abigail looks to her boss expectantly as the door shuts behind them.

“There’s still the matter of the copycat who murdered Cassie Boyle,” he launches immediately without prompting.

“Right, what about him?” Her eyes widen and she scoots forward in her seat as the man continues to simply stare at her. “Jack, no! You can’t seriously be thinking Will Graham.”

“I’m thinking someone Garret Jacob Graham knew, someone he used to go hunting with. I’ve had plenty of sources say Will Graham fits that profile.”

“But he doesn’t fit the profile _I_ gave when we found Cassie Boyle.”

“Then maybe your profile is wrong.”

“Or maybe _your_ profile is wrong.” The two of them continue to stare each other down for a minute, neither of them willing to back down and concede victory. It’s not often the pair of them lock horns like this, but Abigail has learned from years of experience and practice that the key with Jack is in not flinching, as any scrap of perceived weakness on her part is as good as defeat. It’s the one thing she hates about working with him sometimes, but he’s still nowhere near as bad as some other bosses she’s had. Jack is at least a good man, even if he is a bullheaded one.

“If it’s not Will Graham, then Will Graham knows who it is,” he says without breaking in tone or posture. Abigail does not smile or gloat; to do so would be to void what she has just won.

“It’s possible,” she allows agreeably.

“Find out,” he commands, pointing.

“Yes, sir.” Abigail gets up from her chair, knowing when she’s being dismissed.

The drive to the hospital is not long, though she and her new field partner don’t say much on the way there. Lecter navigates them from behind the wheel and allows her the privacy to prepare her own mental notes, undoubtedly doing the same. She wishes everyone she rode with could be so considerate and less prone to idle chatter when she’s trying to work.

She drums her fingers along the armrest on the way over there, on her own arm as they walk shoulder to shoulder down the hall to Graham’s room. Normally an impatient gesture, incongruent with the way she stops when they’re just outside the door, doing a last minute check to make sure the buttons on her blazer are done up correctly, tossing a strand of hair back over her shoulder like an agitated horse flicking its mane. It doesn’t actually hit her what this fidgety feeling is until she’s already given a quick, jerky nod to her companion that he can open the door for them now.

She’s nervous. That’s new. She never gets nervous, at least not about things like this. Witness interviews are a standard part of the job and often one of the easiest once she’d gotten the pattern for most of them down. She could do them half-asleep and has before on some all-nighter operations, without her witness being any the wiser that she was anything less than fully attentive.

The behavioral profiler in her wants to examine this feeling, run her fingers over it like running one’s tongue over a toothache. No time for that now. The boy in the bed has her full attention at the moment, frail-looking while still in his hospital nightgown. There is a bandage still on his neck where his father’s blade bit into skin. He shouldn’t seem so frightening.

“Will, I’m Special Agent Abigail Hobbs,” she introduces herself. “And this is Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Do you remember us?”

“I remember you.” Graham shifts, lifting his gaze higher to meet hers full-on. She recalls Alana’s remark about his difficulty with eye contact, consistent with what others have stated as well, and gets the impression then that he doesn’t do this often. Knowing that affects her more strongly than she expects.

Abigail’s mother always warned her the most important moments in her life would come wrapped up in simple ones such as these, their potency drawn from the smallest of actions, and she believes it now, pinned in place by a teenager’s eyes like needles through a butterfly’s wings.

“You’re the woman who killed my dad,” he says, and Abigail forgets everything she was going to say next.

“Will, we would like to ask you a few questions about what happened that day, if it’s alright?” Lecter thankfully takes over for her. Even more thankfully, it pulls that piercing stare away from her immediately and allows her a chance to collect herself.

“That’s a funny accent,” says Graham with a lack of tact which reminds her that he is, after all, just a teenager. “Where’d you get it?”

There is a brief pause in which Abigail is sure the older man must be offended before she realizes the faint microexpression pulling at the corners of his lips and eyes could actually be a smile. “Lithuania,” he answers finally.

“Huh. Wonder if I could point to there on a map if I tried.” The boy’s tolerance for eye contact appears to run out as he shifts his focus to somewhere around shoulder height and between them both. “So y’all are here to interview me about my dad now?”

“That’s right,” says Abigail, glad to have found her voice again. “I realize how painful it must be to think about, but we need to understand what happened that morning in the moments leading up to our arrival.”

_“Yeah,”_ Will says, letting the word drawl out, gaze now drawn to Hannibal’s floral pocket square. “That sure was some timing y’all had.”

It doesn’t have quite the same sucker punch impact as his first words to her, but it’s close. She wonders if he even knows he’s doing it. “I wish we could have gotten there fast enough to stop it altogether, to save your mother,” she admits like it’s a confession.

“Stepmother,” he corrects softly.

“What?” She expected him to say something like, _“But you didn’t,”_ or _“Me too,”_ but not this almost non-sequitur.

“My stepmother,” he repeats. He puts a hand up to wave for her to be quiet although she hasn’t said anything yet. “I’m not saying that the way other kids might, to put up distance like she should matter less, because she doesn’t, not to me. I just…” He sighs before looking up at her again finally. “In the interest of telling you everything that I can, you should probably know that I don’t know who my birth mom was. Dad was always…vague, didn’t want to talk about her. Just said that she ran out on us when I was a baby.” He glances down again, picking at some random spot on the covers in front of him with a tiny, hollow smirk. “I think I know better now. She’s dead. He killed her too. I’d guess she figured out what he really was, tried to take me and run, and he couldn’t have that now, could he?”

It makes a horrifying amount of sense. Pathological tendencies like the ones Garret Jacob Graham exhibited don’t tend to crop up overnight, and at least one kill already under his belt could explain why the man never seemed comfortable staying in one place for too long in Will’s earlier formative years, too paranoid then perhaps about being caught.

“I’m so sorry, Will,” she says, but the boy merely shrugs. She supposes the loss of a woman he never even knew wouldn’t really have the same immediate impact as everything else he’s been through.

“Thank you for telling us, Will. We now know to look deeper into your father’s background to see if there are any other missing persons cases he might be linked to.” Abigail envies the psychiatrist’s continued consummate professionalism, something she usually has no trouble with herself either.

“Anyway, that’s not why you’re here,” Will says, eyes affixed to the man’s paisley tie now. “You want to know what it is that made him snap right before you guys got there.” His gaze wanders up to Lecter’s chin. “Well, I’d like to know that too. Because one minute we were making breakfast and everything was fine, he was n _-normal,_ loving…” The boy pauses, voice shaking. “Right up til the second he wasn’t. Then he was waving the knife around, he was…erratic, angry. _Hurt._ I was just…stood there shocked, still trying to figure out what I’d said or done wrong when he started coming at us.” The tears that have been sitting start to fall. Will sniffs and swipes them away impatiently. “M-mom was in the middle. He got to her first.”

Hannibal removes a handkerchief from his waistcoat pocket, a decadent brocaded silk affair with a pattern of lilies and narcissus to match the pocket square, and offers it to him. After the boy is done dabbing his eyes, he tries to hand the cloth back, but Hannibal closes his fingers gently over Will’s and says, “You may wish to keep that for now.”

“It may be hard to remember, but was there anything different about that morning at all?” Abigail asks. “Even the smallest something out of place could tell us more about what set him off.”

“Will, there are records indicating a call from an unknown number during those final few minutes,” Lecter tells him, clearly deciding Abigail’s subtle approach isn’t going to do much good for jogging Will’s memory. “Do you know anything about that?”

The younger man stares up at him blankly for a moment. “Well, um, now that you mention it…” He turns his head away to look vaguely in Abigail’s direction. “There was a call from a blocked number. Mom picked up, said it was just a scammer and hung up on them. Why? Do you think it was important?”

Abigail shakes her head, doing her best to bury her disappointment. “We’re just trying to look at it from all angles, leave no stone unturned. That’s all.”

“Wait, do you think that might have been what made Dad so mad?” he presses. “Like…he thought she was lying to him or something?”

“If that was all it took, then I fear your father was much further gone in his paranoia than any of us could have known, and it was fortunate indeed that we arrived when we did.” Hannibal looks to Abigail and adds, “He was under a lot of strain after his failure with Elise. Even the slightest provocation afterwards must have been the straw which broke the camel’s back. Nothing could have predicted it.”

“What failure?” Will asks. “Who’s Elise?”

Abigail may need to have a talk with Hannibal after this about being more careful not to bring up potentially sensitive information around material witnesses.

“I have a right to know,” Will says, looking straight to her as if he can tell what she’s thinking. “Who’s Elise? How did he ‘fail’ with her? What couldn’t he do?”

“You must be tired of sitting in bed all day, Will,” says Hannibal. “Come, let’s go for a walk outside before we continue this discussion further. I’m sure we could all use the fresh air.”

*

Will Graham belongs out here, among the hothouse flowers and bare branches twining like antlers crowned above his head, far more than he does within the blandly painted walls of Port Haven. The revitalized perk to his step even as Abigail Hobbs haltingly navigates the thorny business of explaining Elise Nichols to him makes this apparent. He cannot keep still, walking ahead of them both to explore the garden and seeming more interested in that than in listening to the very explanation he demanded. He is still holding Hannibal’s handkerchief.

He stops on tiptoes to reach up with his free hand for one of the few, perfectly formed red-gold leaves still clinging onto an overhanging limb, plucking it to twirl by the stem between his fingertips like an uncaring nymph in his bower. It is not surprising at all and even fitting, Hannibal believes, that this one boy who may hold the key to Hannibal’s ruin and knows it would be effortlessly beautiful. He could not have written his own possible downfall better if he had conjured Will Graham from thin air.

“Why would he just put her back like that?” Will asks, proving that despite appearances he has indeed been listening. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

“He attempted to remove an organ from her, the liver,” Hannibal responds to give Hobbs some reprieve.

The boy stops twirling the leaf, turning to look back over his shoulder at them both. “Attempted?”

“He returned it shortly thereafter. Sewed it back into place.”

Will looks away, towards the ground, perhaps at some vision only he can see. “There was something wrong with the meat then.” He tosses the leaf aside into the dirt. “Wasn’t there?”

“She had liver cancer,” Abigail confirms.

“He was feeding them to us,” Will exhales in a breathless rush, swaying to let himself fall against the trunk of the tree. “He was eating them, and we were eating them with him.”

“We believe it very likely, yes,” says Hannibal.

The boy suddenly leans forward, hands on both knees, and struggles to breathe against the rising panic that appears to be trying to claw its way upward. Abigail is at his side in an instant to rub his back and shoulders and whisper soothing nonsense words which are not so secretly as much for her own benefit as for his. The pull of his jacket and shirt collars as he bends forward allows the bandage to be visible again. The handkerchief is still in his hand, now currently resting in the space between his right knee and upper thigh.

What a dangerous creature this child is. Clever enough to offer up unsolicited truths like the tale of the birth mother so he can hug other truths more tightly to his chest, offering half-truths and omissions in their place instead without brilliant Hobbs being any the wiser. Achingly genuine in his emotions, full to the brim with them until they spill over into others. He has a penchant for manipulation which no one but Hannibal seems to recognize—indeed, Will Graham may not be wholly aware of it himself—for the simple fact that it is composed of more truth than lies, more empathy than selfishness, and is at times such as these not even consciously deployed.

He is so lovely in suffering that even the toughened likes of Abigail Hobbs and ever-professional Alana Bloom cannot help but fall over themselves to catch his tears in their hands. No wonder Garret Jacob Graham could not bear to let him go.

Will straightens again and the woman’s touch falls away with instinctive care to allow him room, lest she linger overlong and find herself unwelcome. The boy seems not to even notice his own light touch to her arm as she pulls away as if to reassure her of his appreciation, nor her relief at the gesture. Both are fascinating.

He also wipes away more moisture from his eyes with Hannibal’s handkerchief once more. The older man hopes he will not try to return it again. It is not often Hannibal must question his own impulses, but he does not know which of the two he is feeling should he get it back concern him more—the one to hold onto it ever afterwards unwashed, or the one to toss it straight away into the fireplace and watch it burn.

“I want to go home,” the boy says. “Can you take me home?” He is looking to Hannibal, not Abigail. It is possible he believes the truth of the phone call to be a bargaining chip between them. Something will have to be done about that, and soon.

“It can be cathartic to have that closure, to say one’s last goodbyes to what was in person,” he responds. “We shall see what can be arranged.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Empathy just might be a scary, scary superpower in the hands of an unlicensed teenager. Also, every time I write a version of Hannibal Lecter who thinks he can unlock the secret to mastering Will Graham without also being mastered in turn, I cackle inside.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal, Abigail, and Alana take Will back to his old house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal Lecter has never once, not even for a moment, in a single fic that I've ever written had even one tiny ounce of chill concerning Will Graham.
> 
> He continues to be somehow subtly even _worse_ in this one.
> 
> Actually, if this chapter had a title, it would be "NO ONE Has Any Goddamn Chill About Will Graham," but at least with everyone else it's a lot more innocent and a little less concerning.

Though the trip had been Will’s idea, it escapes none of his traveling companions’ notice that the boy has been more taciturn and withdrawn since the flight. There is a little more snark and bite to his words when he does speak, reminding Hannibal of the rude teenager he had spoken with on the phone. It is even more apparent now than it was then that this is a well-worn and quick go-to defense mechanism, their seating arrangement giving Hannibal the added luxury of getting to watch him up close.

The boy squares his shoulders stubbornly as if he is fighting every animal instinct to curl in on himself instead. Alana has glanced to him worriedly more than once while trying not to be obvious about it, no doubt thinking of her voiced concerns in Jack’s office earlier that bringing Will back to the house might only cause him more trauma.

She may be right, but Hannibal is eager to see how this plays out all the same, to bear witness to Will’s reactions as he navigates the space of his once warm and familiar home. Will it feel different and corrupted to him now such that he moves through it as a wary stranger might, or will its very familiarity be what haunts him as he moves through its halls? He suspects the latter, especially given what he has surmised so far about the boy’s heightened empathy. It will be a treat to observe.

The two women in front stiffen as one as they approach the driveway to the late Grahams’ homestead. Within moments, Hannibal has a clear enough view of his own through the windshield to see why. Given the utter stillness of the last passenger beside him, Will has already seen it too.

“Goddammit,” Hobbs mutters under her breath as she puts the vehicle in park. Dr. Bloom is half-turned in her seat, prepared to say something to Will, but the boy has unhooked his seatbelt and is already halfway out of the car. A brief spasm of worried alarm crosses her features before she unbuckles and gets out herself, but Will does nothing more than stand in place to gaze ahead at the graffitied word emblazoned in sharp, dripping black over a wide expanse of the garage door.

**CANNIBALS.**

It is certainly evocative, no matter how crude or unimaginative. The subject matter needs no creative embellishment after all to drive its message home.

“If you want to leave at any point, you just have to say so,” Bloom reminds him. Will gives a tiny shake of his head without averting his gaze.

“I’m sure it’ll come right off,” Hobbs tries to reassure, the last one to get out of the car this time, in interesting contrast to their previous visit. “We just need a bucket and a few soapy sponges.”

“Why bother?” Will asks. “It’s true, right? And not like I have any reason to care about the resale value anyway.” Without looking at any of them, Will marches ahead towards the house. Abigail and Alana share an uneasy glance before following him, Hannibal falling into step behind where he can most easily observe all three of them.

The young man has stopped on the porch, very nearly toeing the edge of the deep dark stain there seeped into stone. The expression on his face isn’t quite blank, but it’s difficult to puzzle out. Hobbs looks compelled to say something but torn about whether she should or not. The impulse wins out.

“It was quick,” she says. “She didn’t suffer long, and in what little time she had left, she…” Abigail falters for a second, wincing perhaps at her own phrasing, before pushing past it. “All she cared about was that I get inside, to get to you.”

Will’s fingers curl up into loose fists at his sides and he tilts his head almost as a bird or a small mammal might, still looking down at the spot where Karen Graham died as if it would speak to him directly. He then does something most peculiar.

The instinct for many people with knowledge of what the stain is would be to step over or skirt carefully around that spot on their way into the house. Will Graham takes one deliberate step forward and stops to stand in the center of it. He closes his eyes, and soon after begins to softly tremble.

“Will? _Will!”_ Alana reaches out to him on instinct, something she will undoubtedly chastise herself for later as touching a patient in the midst of an episode is generally inadvisable, but he hardly reacts beyond another small head twitch in her direction when she places her hand on his arm. His eyes are darting rapidly behind their lids like a dreamer awake.

It’s over in moments. He turns to the psychiatrist and gives a shaky smile which does little to reassure her. “It’s okay. I’m fine. Let’s go inside now.”

“Are you sure?” Hobbs asks him. He nods, darting another unconvincing smile in her direction as well, and just as before, slips quietly ahead of them without waiting and enters the house with the key she had let him hold onto rather than deny him the right.

Abigail looks to both of her colleagues in hopes that one of them will have an explanation for what just happened. Hannibal has an inkling or two but hasn’t decided how much he’s willing to divulge just yet.

“This is a mistake,” Alana tells them in an undertone. “Remember what I said before?” One of the possibilities she had addressed was that Will might reenact some part of the crime. Though this is surely not what any of them had in mind during that discussion, it pleases Lecter that his professional peer is perceptive enough to have made a similar guess about what just transpired within the confines of Will’s own mind.

“Then we had best not leave him alone in there for too long,” Hannibal intones just as quietly.

“Right. We’ll keep an eye on him and leave straight for the hotel if it happens again,” Abigail promises. She steps inside and Alana follows immediately after, both of them, whether consciously or not, avoiding the stain. Unbeholden to social convention with neither of them watching, Hannibal merely walks through it.

Unsurprisingly, Will is already in the kitchen waiting for them. Hobbs and Bloom watch him carefully for signs of another reaction like the one outside, but the teen’s gaze about this room is almost dispassionate by comparison. There is something lurking behind it though, particularly as he eyes the now pristine spots on the floor where he and Graham both fell.

Lecter wonders if to him those tiles still appear to be just as stained and bloody as the concrete outside, whether the very air around his ears is still smeared with screams. An older and wiser man would perhaps not be so eager to face down his own demons again so soon and confront them head on. In this, Will reminds Hannibal curiously of himself at around the same age. It’s almost a pity Hobbs has already ended the father, thus denying the son a chance to reach that same catharsis, but there are other ways to exorcise ghosts. Hannibal wants to help him find them.

Will takes a turned-over postcard from the refrigerator door and frowns, flipping it over in his hand. “Why are these turned around?”

“Cleaners will do that during their rounds,” says Abigail.

“I guess that makes sense. Might be awkward to have a guy staring at you and smiling while you’re busy scrubbing his Jackson Pollock brains out of the woodgrain and whorl patterns on the cabinets.” Hobbs blanches. Bloom shifts just the smallest amount closer to offer her a grounding touch without calling attention to the gesture.

Hannibal thinks it telling that this is the detail Will would remember and latch onto, rather than associate that particular memory more strongly with the sticky red mess his own blood would have left behind as it pooled on the tile currently beneath his feet. Maybe it is because Garret Jacob Graham died in this room, a fate that was originally intended for him, now no longer meant to be.

Will looks up from the photograph and notices the subtle change in the room. “Oh…sorry,” he tells Abigail sheepishly. “That was too morbid, wasn’t it? Shit. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to make it weird, bringing that up. Um. Weirder than it already is. I mean…right. I should just…I’ll shut up now.” He ceases babbling to awkwardly replace the picture on the fridge door. This sudden transition from snide speaker of the unspeakable to mortified teen is an oddly endearing one, but it won’t do to allow Will’s embarrassment to bar him from freely speaking his mind.

“It’s fine to be weird,” he tells Will. “And perfectly natural to find refuge in macabre humor at reminders of our own mortality.”

“Hannibal’s right,” says Alana. “You have nothing to apologize for.” Will’s eyes flick from one psychiatrist to the other, but it’s apparent he has very little interest in their opinions on the matter, leaving them to rest somewhere in the vicinity of Abigail’s chin to await her verdict.

The woman gives him a fine, small smile of her own. “Don’t hold back whatever you’re thinking on my account, Will. Hell, you can yell at me if it helps. Call me any names you want, I’ve heard them all before. I’m a big girl, I promise I can take it.”

The boy looks at her with a considering frown. “Do you feel guilty? For killing him?”

Abigail returns the look before answering, though it is unlikely, given Hannibal’s understanding of the agent, that she actually needs to think about it. “No,” she says honestly after a moment.

“Then why do you want me to hate you so badly?” he fires back, shaking this time with genuine anger and startling everyone in the room with the sudden force of it.

None are so startled as the very woman who asked for him to yell at her, but it is the question itself which disconcerts her more than its delivery. “I don’t,” she says. _“I don’t,_ that’s the last thing I want, I…” She halts, realizing the enormity of what she’s already allowed to slip out, eyes widening. Alana appears stunned by the exchange as well and at a loss for who to address first.

Hannibal is a voyeur in the room, wholly aware that to the others he might as well not exist in this moment, yet to his own surprise he is no more offended by this than if he were in attendance at an opera and they the actors upon the stage. He is riveted.

Abigail takes a tiny step backwards. “I…think I need a minute to myself,” she says, her calm and sensible tone at odds with her body language, which is more akin to that of a cornered animal. “If you’d all excuse me.” She spins on her heel and exits. The glass door to the backyard can be heard sliding open and shut again a few moments later.

Alana watches her leave and looks torn between going after her, as any stalwart partner and friend might, and her duty to her patient. The latter, of course, wins out as it must.

“Did I do something wrong?” Will whispers, his moods as mercurial and ever-shifting as the tides. Now instead of angry, he looks as stricken as the woman who departed so abruptly.

“Of course not,” says Alana. “It’s just hard on Abigail as well, being here. She’ll be fine in a minute.”

“I will see to her,” Hannibal offers. “Make sure she’s alright to carry on before we continue this.”

His colleague shoots him a grateful look. “Come on,” she says to Will, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Why don’t you show me around a little in the meantime?” Hannibal leaves them to it.

Abigail has not ventured far outside, only to the edge of the back porch looking out into the yard. She twists her head enough to look over her shoulder and see who is coming up behind her, then turns her head back. “What,” she says gravely without looking at him, “the _hell_ did I just do?” Were it not inappropriate, Hannibal might laugh at the question which is an interesting echo of Will’s. Or perhaps it is Will’s question which is the echo, his own sentiments muddled by hers. Something to ponder at a later time.

“This isn’t me,” she says, frustrated. “You have no reason to believe me,” she adds, looking to him at last when he stops to stand beside her. “But it’s not. I don’t _do this,_ run scared from children like some…” She trails off to huff a self-deprecating laugh, shaking her head. “I don’t even know. I don’t…I _know_ where the line is. I mean, I’m not completely callous, I know that my cases are more than just _cases,_ they’re other people’s lives too, but I’ve never lost sight of which side I’m standing on— _my_ cases, _their_ lives. Separate. Distinct. The line doesn’t move, doesn’t blur, it just _is.”_

“Until now,” says Hannibal.

“Yeah,” she says. “What the hell happened to it?” That’s an easy enough answer, he thinks. Will Graham happened. The boy has a strange, wild card, magnetic effect on every person he comes into contact with, it seems. As with any magnet, there are some who must be repulsed by it and some who are inherently drawn in and compelled to stick close. Indifference, Hannibal suspects, would be impossible.

Were Will ever to become aware of this curious side effect of his empathy and the sway it might grant him over others, what would he do with it? Would he become distant and merciful, or playful and intimately cruel? The ancient Greeks understood the nature of gods best—kept at a worshipful distance, their blessings are benign as keepers of the natural order of the universe. To personally hold a god’s gaze, however, is to court disaster, perhaps even tragedy.

Hannibal is uncertain whether he has done enough to earn the full extent of Will Graham’s gaze just yet, but Will Graham has certainly earned his. What carnage may come of it, and to whom, he cannot yet say, but it will be bloody. He is looking forward to it, but if he were a wiser man, perhaps he too would try running from the boy instead, before the connection becomes impossible to pull away from without something snapping.

To Abigail, he says, “You saved Will Graham’s life. You also orphaned him. It comes with a staggering amount of obligation.”

“I already know what Alana’s going to say later. That I need to step back, reestablish that distance.”

Here, a delicate hand is needed. Hannibal must weigh his words carefully. He does not want to risk alienating Alana now, as he still values their friendship, and any impact he may have on Abigail Hobbs will be severely limited if he does not also have Bloom on his side.

“There is a scenario in which keeping a distance from Will would give him room to grow, to stand on his own and move on from his trauma.” He allows some hesitancy to color his next statement. “It is also possible we have already moved past the point where that scenario would still be viable, however.” Abigail turns to him, no longer looking out into the shaded lawn. “Will was asking after you before I came out here. He was quite distressed by the way you left.” He can see his statement already having the desired effect. Now to twist the knife further. “The attachment you feel is not one-sided, Abigail. I fear if you start distancing yourself now, he will take it as a rejection from the one person he can least afford it from. If his own savior deems him not worth the effort, what does that leave him with?”

“So you’re saying damned if I do, damned if I don’t?” she asks, aghast. “Either way, I’ve already fucked this up. He’s gonna be messed up because of me, isn’t he?”

“You can certainly do no worse than Garret Jacob Graham.” This pulls a grim chuckle from the profiler. Hannibal allows himself a smirk as well and places a hand on her shoulder. “Will has been unmoored from every certainty he once had in his life, but we can be the support system he needs to get back on his feet again.”

_“We,”_ Abigail notes, looking up at him again with a smile this time. “That’s your way of saying you like him too, huh?”

“Difficult to avoid,” he admits, though if he is being honest, he has felt no real inclination to try.

Abigail nods. “Thank you for this,” she says after a short pause. “I know it hasn’t been an hour, but you should probably bill me.”

“We’ll call this a pro bono session,” he winks. She laughs again. This time it sounds more genuine.

“Somehow I don’t think this is the last time I’ll need one, so how about I call you next time I have my credit card and my calendar in front of me?”

Hannibal smiles. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”

*

Half of Will’s things are already bagged and boxed up, it turns out when he gets upstairs to his room with Dr. Bloom in tow. His nightshirt is nowhere in sight, and even though he knew to expect this and logic tells him it’s most likely in one of the boxes stacked on top of his stripped mattress, he still has to bite down on his lip and just… _breathe_ for a second to hold back the irrational, childish, panicked scream he can feel perched right beneath his chin. He’s eighteen and therefore technically an adult, goddammit, he is _not_ going to have a meltdown about a stupid old scrap of cloth in front of a woman he’s only known for a few days. He can’t. He _won’t._

He walks into the room and keeps his expression calm and stoic so the doctor won’t ask him what’s wrong. His fallback stim, the fidget cube toy his mom gave him two Christmases ago, is not on the nightstand where he left it either. (Why? Why why why are they doing this to him? Do they expect to find missing girl teeth inside or something? Oh god, what if they pry it open to check and they _break it_ and then he’ll have to get a new one and that should be fine but it’s _not_ because it won’t be the same one that Karen got him, and then he’ll have to become a murderer like his dad because _of course he’s going to find whoever broke it and peel their fucking face off with his fingernails,_ _what else did they expect was going to happen?_ )

Will closes his eyes for a second and wills his tensed up muscles to relax. Dr. Bloom has surely noticed by now in spite of his efforts that he’s not taking the changes to his room very well, but he appreciates her not saying anything and letting him sort through the frustration he feels on his own. He doesn’t want to talk about it or be comforted and reassured again either.

The toy isn’t on his nightstand, but his glasses are, enclosed in a clear plastic bag with an official-looking label on it, which in spite of that still looks a lot like the kind of clear plastic bag you pack sandwiches in. Will guesses the only reason they haven’t been put in a box yet is because they might break and no one’s found the case he accidentally dropped down the gap between the wall and his headboard yet. He starts to tear open the bag and hears a softly cleared throat behind him.

He turns to look at Dr. Bloom for the first time since they came up here. “Oh, come on,” he pleads. “I _need_ these. Or do they really expect to find dead girl pieces in the lenses?” Oh god, why does he even open his mouth? Bloom’s face pinches briefly in mild discomfort, but thankfully the look passes quickly into one a little more sardonic. It _is_ a rather absurd thought, after all. Relieved, he tacks on, “Besides, shouldn’t medical requirements still take precedence over anything else?”

“You’d think,” she replies. “Unfortunately, the line tends to be drawn at life or death medications and equipment only. Anything deemed less than absolutely vital to immediate health and safety typically gets processed the same as everything else.” It’s clear from her tone that she has _strong opinions_ about this, however, and after a quick glance at the doorway behind them, she turns so that she’s not looking at Will directly and says, “Obviously, since you brought those with you today, it shouldn’t be a problem, of course.”

Will grins and rips the bag open, eagerly jamming them on as quickly as he can without poking himself in the eye. He didn’t tell Bloom that his “medical requirement” is negligible since he’s just a little near-sighted and technically only needs them for driving or reading the board from the back of a classroom, but immediately it’s a relief to have them as a barrier between himself and the rest of the world again. He’s not sure what to do with the little baggie, so he just stuffs it down the back pocket of his jeans to deal with later.

Now if only he could find the toy and his shirt and figure out a way to get them out too without anyone noticing. Dr. Bloom is being kind enough to let him get away with this much. It wouldn’t be right to ask more of her.

He’s still thinking about it when they sit on his bed to chat for a bit while they wait for the others to come back, wondering how he can convince his chaperones to leave him alone just long enough for him to double-back up here, but it turns out to be much easier than he expected. He hears voices downstairs and assumes the others have returned from their own talk outside. As he and Alana both stand, however, one of the voices raises a little in volume—Abigail’s—and a third voice responds, also female…possibly. Will always gets annoyed with himself when he catches himself making assumptions like that.

“Wait here for a minute,” Alana says, gesturing that he should stay put before stepping out herself and shutting the door softly behind her. He’s not about to waste this chance.

The first box is just a bunch of his schoolbooks and stuff like that. He opens the next one and lucks out—the fidget cube is right on top. He grabs it and his favorite pen. After a second of hesitation, he takes the folding knife his father gave him after the first time he ever took him hunting as well.

The articles of clothing that have already been packed up, he discovers to his dismay, are sealed individually in some kind of opaque white bags which are annoying to rip open and check. He has to guess by feel which articles are about the right size and material, and can already feel himself starting to panic a little as he goes through the stack haphazardly. He’s running out of time.

Familiar washed-out black is visible through the next one he pokes a hole in and he dry-sobs in relief, tearing the bag to pieces in his haste to get it open while still being careful of the worn fabric inside. He holds the shirt up to his face like he’s trying to smother himself with it and just breathes deep for a few precious seconds.

Footsteps coming. Hastily, he balls the shirt up as tight and small as he can get it. It’s old and thin enough to fit in his front hoodie pocket easily, he just hopes no one notices the slight bulge. Shit, the clothes box is a fucking _mess_ though, and even when he tosses everything back in, the lid doesn’t quite sit right on top anymore.

He springs back from it when the knob starts to turn before realizing that’s stupid because _of course, he’s allowed to be on the fucking bed,_ but by then it’s too late so he just stands there and tries to look casual but not too much like he’s _trying_ to look casual and has to hope for the best.

The diffident smile Dr. Lecter gives him from the other side of the open doorway betrays nothing, but the casual way his eyes rake over Will, beginning and ending with the newly placed glasses over his ears, might suggest he isn’t too fooled by Will’s careless pose. Nonetheless, he says nothing except, “Will, a minor situation has come up which you may be able to help with, if you would please come downstairs.” He leans a bit to open the door wider and allow Will room to pass, but with his hand still on the knob, it’ll be a squeeze to get past without accidentally brushing against him. Inexplicably, Will swallows, but he does as asked.

His shoulder does end up brushing a little with the man’s arm, and Will ducks his head away, blushing furiously and praying it’ll have faded by the time he gets to the top of the stairs so that no one calls him out on it.

Alana and Abigail are waiting for him in the living room along with another familiar face, though it takes him a second to place why it’s also familiar.

“This girl says she’s a friend of yours, Will,” Alana states with just the slightest trace of a question underneath, wanting to hear it confirmed.

“She’s my neighbor,” Will says. The last time Will might have called Marissa Schurr a friend was in sixth grade. What is she doing here now?

Marissa rolls her eyes at the distinction. “Whatever. Classmate then, if you’re gonna be salty. I just saw the car in the driveway and figured I’d come by and say hi.”

“Well, you’ve come by and said it,” says Abigail. She seems annoyed now that it’s apparent the girl just showed up more or less to snoop and isn’t actually someone close to Will. Or maybe she’s just annoyed that Marissa walked into the house uninvited when there’s still an active investigation centered around it going on. “Now I need to ask you to leave.”

“Hold on, it’s okay,” Will tells them. “I’ll talk to her.” He isn’t sure what makes him say it really. Maybe he just wants a bit of normalcy for once. It could be nice, talking to someone who knew him before…well, _before._

She offers him a stick of gum when they go out to the backyard, leaving the adults behind indoors. Will declines. “So.” She blows a translucent pink bubble out between her lips and pops it. “You got hot,” she says as if she hasn’t seen him in passing in the hallways every day since middle school. Maybe he sank so far below her radar once they stopped hanging out anymore that she genuinely didn’t notice him.

“You’ve never thought so before,” he says, because how else is he supposed to respond? With a thank you?

“Yeah, well I wasn’t a lesbian, was I?” Will’s jaw clenches. He remembers now why he didn’t exactly mourn the loss when the light from friendship gradually faded between them years ago. There were rumors going around about him being gay even back then which he hadn’t really been able to refute. (Even though, confusingly, he’d also had a crush on a boy named Davion Barnes at the time. It would be a few more years before Will sorted himself out enough to figure out the whole “bi trans guy” thing.) He’d assumed then that Mrs. Schurr’s paranoia was the reason he stopped getting invited to any sleepovers, but maybe he’s actually talking to one of the sources for those rumors.

“Everybody thinks you did it, you know,” she tosses out lightly, and Will stops walking just to hear the sound of crunching leaves under his feet to turn and look at her. He can tell by how casually she announces it that she doesn’t really believe it herself, but there’s a thread of something in her voice that does give him pause. Almost like excitement, maybe. Is _that_ why Will is so interesting all of a sudden? Some kind of “bad boy” reputation she can brag to their classmates about and rub rebelliously in her mom’s face, like murdering a bunch of girls around their age is somehow the equivalent of riding a motorcycle and smoking cigarettes behind the bleachers at football games?

Christ. Some people really do seem to be almost too dumb to live sometimes.

“For the record, I don’t think you’re the type,” she adds when Will has nothing to say to that.

“I do.” Will’s glad he’s not the only one who jumps a bit at the new voice. Both of them turn to see a man emerging from the treeline, lanky and red-headed, probably just a few years older than them. “I think you’re a sick freak just like your old man. You and dad like to carve into girls for fun and cut their lungs out while they’re still using them, huh? Is that what you did to all of them or was my sister just _special?”_ he spits, walking aggressively towards them.

“Hey, piss off!” shouts Marissa, and tosses a rock at the man that pegs him right in the face.

The guy stumbles and looks about ready to charge at her too now, but as he straightens he sees something behind them, and promptly turns tail and runs.

“Will, who was that?” Hannibal asks calmly. Abigail is not far behind him and looking off into the distance where the redhead had gone, while Alana comes into view from around the front of the house rather than the back door. Mrs. Schurr is with her.

Everything is happening so fast it feels like his head is about to spin right off the top of his neck. The adrenaline spike has left him tongue-tied, and he doesn’t realize that his breathing has gotten a little erratic too until Hannibal cups both hands around his jaw and the sides of his neck, effectively holding his head in place and forcing him to lock gazes with the older man, the sweep of a thumb under his eye strangely calming enough that he can feel his lungs slow their intake of air immediately. “Will?” the man prompts again gently.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “He…he said my dad cut his sister up while she was still alive.” Hannibal tilts his head ever so slightly, his eyes dark and glittering and strange.

“Marissa!” Mrs. Schurr calls sharply, cutting into the bubble of reverie and calm Will had found just a moment ago. Dr. Lecter’s hands drop away from his face. “You come home this instant!” she says.

“Quit being such a bitch, Mom!” the girl fires back. “It’s been real, dude,” she tosses in Will’s direction. “Laters.”

Abigail stomps into the forest to search for his mysterious verbal assaulter, and Lecter decides to follow. “Stay at the house with Dr. Bloom,” he says, squeezing Will’s shoulder lightly. Will has no desire to run into the angry man again in the woods and nods obediently.

They both return empty-handed a few minutes later. The house is locked up again and the four of them leave shortly thereafter.

*

Alana lets her coat drape out across the bed behind her, leaning forward where she sits to unzip her boots. It feels domestic, doing this while to her right, Abigail shrugs out of her own top layers down to her camisole, baring toned arms, like they’ve been sharing a room forever instead of just for the night. It’s almost disconcerting how much she likes it.

“How are you feeling?” she asks once the other woman drops onto her own bed and starts to undo her loose bun. Abigail snorts.

“How am I feeling, doc?” she teases. She shakes her hair out and runs quick fingers through it once the tie is free, and looks so off-handedly gorgeous doing it that Alana’s throat tightens. She lets out an exaggerated sigh. “Like I could use a stiff drink. How about you?”

“I’ll pour,” she responds dryly, earning a soft laugh from the other woman as she walks over to the mini-bar on bare feet. There are no beers sadly, but there is a mid-range scotch which appears to be singing both of their names.

Abigail murmurs gratefully as she takes the glass offered from her hand, and Alana sits beside her and takes a sip from hers.

“I don’t think this is how either of us expected to spend our first night together,” Abigail says with a quirked smile and a blush that could be from either the whiskey or her own flirtatious words.

“Can we talk about what happened today?” Alana asks, not allowing herself to get distracted by them.

“I reported it while we were still at the house,” Abigail replies. “From what Will said I think it was Nick Boyle, Cassie’s brother. Which means he was barking up the wrong tree, thinking Garret Graham was the one responsible for her death.”

“I was actually referring to before that,” Alana admits quietly. Abigail lowers her glass from her lips, having been about to take another sip.

“Right,” she says, a little more subdued. “Go ahead.”

Alana takes a fortifying swig of her own, not liking what she feels is necessary for her to say. “I think it may be best that you and Will don’t see each other after this for a while.” Abigail tucks her chin but nods, as if she expected this. “Today proves that you’ve been more affected than we realized, and Will needs time to create his own stability. The last thing either of you needs right now is to develop an emotional dependence on each other.”

“I understand where you’re coming from, and I even agree with it to an extent, but…” She sets her glass down and leans forward a bit, elbows resting on her knees with her hands loosely clasped. “But what if in doing that, he feels like I’ve abandoned him when he needs me the most, and it sets him back?”

Alana sighs, thinking of what she can say to reassure this woman who’s become so dear to her. Looking past her though, Abigail makes an odd, soft noise in the back of her throat. “What’s that?”

“What’s what?” she asks, turning to look over where Abigail is staring. Her knuckles tighten around her own glass and her muscles tense, instinctively preparing to fly up and rush over to her bed, but Abigail gets there first.

_“This,”_ she says, and tugs out the strip of incongruous white plastic poking out from the inner pocket of her coat to reveal the gnarled remnants of a shredded up evidence bag.

“It’s not what it looks like,” she blurts out, face suddenly on fire from more than just the liquor.

Abigail stares down at her with her eyebrows arched, one hand now on her hip and the other still holding up the torn bag like a television presenter would. _“Al,”_ she says with a disbelieving smile in her voice. Alana sets down her own whiskey and stands, now even more embarrassed by the cliché that just slipped out of her mouth, and what’s more, ashamed that it came out under the most clichéd circumstances in the book—as an utter, bullshit lie.

“Okay,” she admits. “I…had a feeling when I left Will alone in his old room earlier that he might have taken some things, and left him downstairs for just a second to check while we were waiting for you and Hannibal to come back. And, um, I was right.”

“Uh huh,” Abigail says, stepping closer into her space. “And you were just, what, going to report it? Confront him about it tomorrow and insist that he put it back? Or _maybe,”_ she says, taking another step closer. “You were going to cover his tracks for him and dispose of the evidence as soon as you got home. It must have been small for him to smuggle it out without getting caught, so who’d notice it missing anyway? Little things have a way of getting lost in the shuffle all the time, after all.”

Alana is finding it very difficult to maintain eye contact _or_ her dignity right at this moment.

“All that talk about emotional distance, and meanwhile you’re _literally_ tampering with the scene of a federal investigation for a patient,” Abigail continues, letting the bag flutter carelessly from her fingertips back onto the bed. She doesn’t sound like she’s angry. She sounds like she’s _laughing,_ but it does nothing to ease the hot pit of shame in Alana’s stomach. It doesn’t change what she did, or the fact that she would do it again in a heartbeat.

“You should’ve seen him upstairs, Abigail,” she says. “Looking around and seeing the sum of his life put away in a few impersonal white boxes. It was like watching someone be gutted.”

No longer smiling with amusement at her expense, but with something softer, Abigail puts her hands around Alana’s, then leans in and kisses her.

She doesn’t know whether it’s the whiskey or the fraught emotions of a long and exhausting day, but the kiss deepens. She pulls back only once, to try to say something against Abigail’s lips, maybe an apology, or something, but the other woman shushes her and tugs her gently by the wrists back to the bed, whispering that she should just let herself go and try to stop thinking so much for once.

Alana does.

*

Both of them already washed and wearing their pajamas for the evening, Hannibal reads for a little while on his tablet in bed while his companion sits cross-legged on his own bed and flips restlessly through channels on the television. It would almost be a quiet and relaxed scene even with the television’s white noise droning on in the background if not for the occasional huff of boredom and annoyance because of it from said companion. If they are to travel together anytime in the near future again, Hannibal will be sure to bring a few books next time to lend to the younger man. A keen mind must be kept sharp and the rot which passes for entertainment on the small screen can hardly be considered up to the task.

Having finished catching up on the news of the day, he glances at the time displayed on his tablet’s screen and gets up. He goes to the sideboard and pours himself a dram of whiskey, then with a considering look at his companion, pours another into the second glass provided and opens a can of cola to mix with it, a simple cocktail which should go a little smoother down an unrefined and inexperienced palate. The scotch is no fine vintage he would lament ruining with a little excess sugar and carbonation.

Will looks up at him with a puzzled frown as he takes the glass offered, sniffing delicately and experimentally at its contents.

“A nightcap to help you unwind and find a more restful sleep tonight,” Hannibal tells him. “It’ll be our little secret,” he promises with a wink. The boy quirks an eyebrow as if to silently remind Hannibal that he has not forgotten this is not the only secret they share. Still, he does not say anything about it even though this is their first time alone in a room together since that fateful meeting. Perhaps he intends to hold it unspoken indefinitely over Hannibal’s head until he decides on something he wants from the older man. Perhaps he simply does not know what to do with the information yet and would prefer to play it safe for now. To acknowledge it could be costly, and he is perhaps wise enough in spite of his age to realize it is not as certain as it would seem for whom the toll would come.

Hannibal returns to his own bed and sits. The boy takes a tentative sip from his drink and makes a charming puckered face at it. Hannibal chuckles lightly, causing the boy to scowl at him and swallow a larger, stubborn swig in retaliation. The scowl lightens after a moment, however, and gives way to a tiny, self-conscious laugh in its place. “Thanks,” he mumbles belatedly. “Um, should we watch a movie or something?” he asks, gesturing his head towards the television.

“Whatever you like,” Hannibal replies. Will takes up the remote again to find something suitable before propping up a pillow to lay back comfortably against.

They continue to imbibe their drinks together as the film progresses, though Hannibal cares little for the taste on his tongue and is far more engrossed in the occasional glimpses he steals of the lovely young thing laid out on the mattress a few feet away. Gradually, the antsy restlessness from earlier mellows out into languid, slower movements and the boy’s eyes reopen from each blink more slowly and with less frequency, until at last they remain closed for a good twenty minutes, his breathing even and deep, the near-empty glass slack in his hand against the mattress.

Hannibal stands and lowers the volume of the film playing with the remote. He plucks the precariously held glass from Will’s fingers and sets it down on the nightstand, then snaps his fingers right next to Will’s ear. The boy does not stir or react.

He brushes a stray curl back and gently, so gently, slides the boy’s spectacles off of his face and sets these aside as well. He pulls the blanket up to his chin, though not without a final admiring glance at the scar over his throat, and smooths it out over his shoulders.

Then he takes Will’s glass to the bathroom to thoroughly rinse out all lingering evidence of its contents, picking up his overnight bag as he goes to change his clothing for the second time that evening.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those dang, silly FBI profilers and their same-sex psychiatrist love interests, always adopting emotionally scarred murder babies together before they've even properly hooked up yet. At least these ladies aren't dawdling about it now for three more seasons. xD
> 
>  
> 
> ~~No, Hannibal, that's now how you hold doors open for people. Or ask them a question. Or mix their drinks. Or tuck them into bed. Or...you know what? This is why we made the "you're a creep" tag, Hannibal. This is exactly why.~~


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another pleasant morning is shattered by yet another startling discovery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Between a lingering cold last month and the many necessary bouncing POV shifts between multiple characters here, this chapter took me a bit longer to work out than I planned and is still only half as long as I wanted, but oh well. xD It's not my best work if you ask me, but there's enough about it I like all the same that I'm pretty satisfied with it. Hopefully you will be too!

“I suppose we should get a move on then,” says Abigail, hair now tied off in a simple ponytail as she starts doing up the last buttons of her blouse. “I forgot to check what time the breakfast bar closes.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” Alana touches up her lipstick in the mirror, something not quite _mischievous_ but certainly knowing and amused glinting in her eyes in the reflection. She’s quite relaxed and good-humored overall this morning, which Abigail can’t help but be a bit smugly pleased about. She’d woken in far better spirits than she might have expected as well after yesterday. “If I know Hannibal—” At precisely that moment, a polite, diffident knock on their door sounds. Alana smirks. “And I do,” she finishes simply, rising to open it. “Good morning, Hannibal.”

“Good morning, Alana,” their visitor greets in kind. “And good morning, Abigail,” he adds as she comes into view behind the other woman. Abigail smiles and nods in return and hopes that will suffice, not wanting to get into a Waltons routine with them here in the open doorway. She sees Will hovering awkwardly somewhere behind the man, hands in his pockets and face partially obscured from view at this angle by Lecter’s shoulder, and wonders if he is deliberately hanging back a bit and hiding in an attempt to also avoid hopping onto the somewhat embarrassing greeting train. The thought makes her have to suppress a quiet chuckle.

Alana invites them both in, adding a soft and warm, “Morning, Will,” when the boy comes more fully into view as he follows Lecter inside. The boy gives a shy approximation of Abigail’s own smile and nod, hands still stuffed in his jean pockets, and stands in the middle of their hotel room to glance around with open interest and a youngster’s lack of grace or tact about it. Abigail watches his gaze skip over the simple dressings of the room likely identical to his and Hannibal’s own to flit instead between their few personal effects still scattered about, their luggage in one corner, shoes in another, Alana’s makeup still sitting atop the counter in front of the mirror.

It lands finally on the beds, both made (and Abigail understands now why Alana insisted on doing so after they got up), but she realizes only then that an observant enough eye will still be able to tell the difference between her and Alana’s quick smoothing out of comforter and pillows over one mattress and the crisp, tightly tucked in, professional folds of the one that was not slept in. Will, she understands immediately, is _very_ observant. She blushes automatically and so does he, before biting his lip and glancing away without looking up at anyone.

“I hope we are not intruding too early whilst you are still getting ready,” says Hannibal. “Will and I have brought breakfast.” He holds an insulated bag aloft in one hand and the same thermos she remembers from their first meeting in the other.

“He says that like I did anything to help,” Will huffs, still looking down at his own toes. “He was halfway done by the time I was barely sitting up. The smell woke me.”

“I can’t believe you cooked for us,” Abigail says as they start rearranging the dining space to make room for four people. The table is just big enough at a squeeze, but there are only two chairs for it so it has to be moved closer to the overlarge, padded lounge chair. She pulls the wheeled desk chair over from the other end of the room for herself. Will settles into the lounge chair and pulls his feet in to sit on top of them with crisscrossed legs, fingers tugging idly at one exposed sock while he waits for everyone else to sit.

“As I said when we met, I’m careful what I put into my body,” Hannibal reminds her with an amused twinkle in his eye. “I bring along a portable stove for any trip in which I cannot reserve a hotel room with a kitchenette.” Such as when the rooms are booked by the bureau and have to meet the allowance set by standard government per diem rates, he means but is far too polite to openly state. Which reminds her that she’ll need to ensure at check-out that the staff knows to charge her personal card for the whisky she and Alana cracked open last night if she doesn’t want to be exposed to ugly glares from HR for the additional paperwork they’ll have to file to take it out of her paycheck otherwise.

“That explains the checked bag,” she notes as they take their seats and Lecter begins plating everyone’s meals from the fancy tupperware he brought. She had wondered why he felt the need for one on such a short trip when everyone else had only a single carry-on.

“A simple protein scramble to start the day,” Hannibal announces their fare with some pleased, if understated, flourish after he pours them all coffee as well. “Some eggs, some sausage, smoked paprika and peppers.”

“This is a little similar to what my parents and I were making on our last morning together.” The sudden silence that descends upon the table following this pronouncement is palpable. Will looks up from his plate at the rest of them with widened eyes. “Sorry, y’all. I…I don’t mean to keep doing that, I swear.”

Alana reaches over to lightly touch his shoulder and rub soothingly with her thumb. Abigail envies a little that she’s close enough to do so, as she would have done the same had it not required leaning across the table.

“Perhaps this meal between all of us can be a way to dispel that unfortunate association then, and replace it with a better one.” Alana looks like there’s a comment she wants to make at Hannibal’s suggestion, or one she feels she _should_ be making rather, but with her hand on Will’s arm still, there would be no wind behind her words to billow the sails of any argument she could make. Not that she would be likely to do so in front of Will anyway. She only looks mildly uncomfortable and guilty for a moment before she forces herself to move past it and finally pulls her hand away.

Abigail for her part tries and fails not to think about the “association” Hannibal may have accidentally just implied would make a suitable replacement. Everything about the setting suddenly, even their odd, mismatched seating arrangements and this little hiccup of awkwardness in the conversation as they each return their attention to their respective plates feels uncomfortably more comfortable than it should, as if it were nothing more than a brief, silly little half-hearted squabble at the dinner table during a family vacation…oh _god._

Abigail keeps her eyes down on her food and stuffs her mouth with a large forkful, half-terrified she will say or silently telegraph something terrible that she shouldn’t if she looks up again at any of them. The zing of flavor that springs up to meet her tongue, thankfully, is a wonderful distraction from other thoughts.

“This is delicious,” Will blurts before she can, with a note of surprise as if he hadn’t expected that. “Kind of spicy too, not as much like what we were making before as I thought.”

“That can only be a good thing, considering what was in those sausages,” Abigail quips before her brain can tell her mouth not to go running off without it.

 _“Abigail,”_ Alana admonishes, disbelieving. Abigail freezes in place and throws her a chastened look. Honestly, she has no idea what had gotten into her to make a remark like that either.

She turns back to Will to apologize and finds that he is now staring at her, fork abandoned beside his plate for the moment, but as soon as their eyes meet, he starts _laughing._ Giggling brightly like it’s the easiest, most natural thing in the world.

“And…and here I was worried,” he says between breaths, still grinning, “that what I’d said was going to put people off their appetites.” Abigail grins back at him, helpless to stop it, his unexpected cheer contagious. Alana looks relieved as well. That could have gone far worse than it had.

Hannibal huffs a quiet laugh of his own, eyes glittering. “It’ll take far more than a little talk of cannibalism at the table to put off my enjoyment of a good meal,” he assures them.

“I…may have to agree actually,” Alana admits with a reluctant, sardonic smile of her own. “But only if it’s your cooking.” Hannibal smiles wider and graciously accepts the many compliments his labors have received around the table, cannibalism quips and all.

Everyone is far more relaxed and mirthful throughout the rest of the meal, and in spite of herself Abigail feels strangely hopeful, like this could be the start of something good.

*

“So how long have you and Agent Hobbs been dating?” Alana does not drop her bag or lose her footing stumbling on the pavement, but that is only because she is standing still and the bag is already slid halfway into place in the trunk of the rental car.

 _“How-_ how do you know about that?” she asks of the boy who seems not to have realized his question would throw her off so thoroughly. She and Will are alone for the moment, just stowing the last of the luggage into the car while Abigail and Hannibal check out at the front desk. “Did someone tell you?”

Will shakes his head. “I just guessed.” He glances down at his feet with a look of something like embarrassment before continuing. “I’m pretty good at that actually. Sometimes. Not always. The way you guys keep looking at each other when you think no one notices though…”

Well, now she’s a bit embarrassed too. She hadn’t realized she and Abigail had been so obvious about it, thought they had hidden it better at least while working and in front of others. “Not long really,” she answers at last. “We’ve known each other a few years, but this is a more, _ah,_ recent development.”

Will makes a sour face at that. _“Why?”_

“Why is it so recent?”

“Yeah. If you knew you liked each other already, why’d you wait for ages to do anything about it? Just seems like a waste of all that time that could have been better spent… _um,_ I don’t know. Kissing and stuff, I guess.”

She huffs out a laugh, a bit wry but also genuine. For a moment, she almost misses the days of her own youth when things like dating and matters of the heart seemed so direct and simple to her as well, before she understood the value of establishing herself on her own path first and how to responsibly balance her personal life with her work one. “You telling me you always tell your crushes how you feel as soon as you get those first stirrings?” she teases.

 _“No,”_ the boy scowls as if the unreasonableness of such a suggestion should be obvious, and Alana forces herself to bite back another laugh lest he take offense to it. “But that’s different. It would only be awkward and humiliating because none of them have ever liked me back. So.”

Her immediate instinct is to reassure and she pushes that down too, understanding the teen well enough at least by this point to know she wouldn’t get much more than a disbelieving eye roll for such platitudes. “How can you be sure if you never take the plunge and find out?” she asks instead.

Will gives her a curiously steady look, very nearly meeting her eyes for once. “I don’t need to find out. I know.” His eyes narrow in a way that seems almost calculating. “You were afraid, weren’t you? That’s why it took you so long.”

That’s shockingly apt and cutting, however simply stated. “It can be scary, taking a chance on someone,” she admits. “But worth it. How about this for an exercise, Will,” she says, the professional and familiar phrase offset by the renewed levity of her tone. “Next time you feel that way about someone, try letting them know. Don’t be like Abigail and me and take ‘ages’ to get around to it. You might be pleasantly surprised.”

“Yeah, sure.” There’s the eye roll she expected. “I’ll let you know how it goes. I’m sure I’ll _really_ need a therapist afterwards.” She shouldn’t laugh again, but another one escapes her nonetheless.

*

That the connection between Will and Abigail, though tentative still, should begin to bloom admirably already with little encouragement on Hannibal’s part is unsurprising, but the camaraderie he sees forming between Will and _Alana_ as they meet up at the rental car to leave for the cabin is another matter. He expected the most challenge to his experiment to come from her end. That there is less opposition than he was planning for may be a more interesting challenge in itself.

Once again, he finds himself of two minds where it concerns Will Graham. He wants to see these relationships grow and develop, to follow their natural progression up close and test the limits of them in time, find where they push and pull at one another and where the delineation between individualism and newly forged family values starts to take hold. He also wants to be the only confidant in whom Will Graham can place his trust entirely.

Until Hannibal can be certain of his own role and make himself indispensable to the willful young creature, he must take added precautions with every calculated risk. For this reason, he had forgone the long pig in favor of genuine pork for this morning’s breakfast. He cannot be sure that Will’s palate would not recognize it, and there is nothing to stop the boy from outing Hannibal if he does.

The difference between sow’s blood and that of a human’s, on the other hand, is far more subtle and thus easily masked with the right spices and presentation. That little substitution had been no trouble at all.

“Did anyone ever come out here with your dad? Anyone besides you?” Abigail asks as they look around on the bottom floor of the pristine cabin. Will shakes his head in reply.

“No, but he came out alone a lot. Did a lot more than the basic cleaning and gutting of carcasses he showed me. Made butter, plumber’s putty, that sort of thing. Turned the pelts he didn’t sell into pillows, carved the bones into knives. He always said it was murder to let any part of them go to waste.” Will swallows, eyes down on the clean surface of the butcher’s table. Hannibal wonders if he is imagining a different sort of carcass there than the ones he had ever seen laid out. Does he see himself, eerily still and gazing sightlessly up at the ceiling as his father’s blade bites into the soft under flesh of his belly?

Then, with a timing and perfect placement Hannibal could not have planned but would have designed in just such a way had he control over this aspect, a single drop of blood drips from the floorboards above and lands on the lens of Will’s glasses just as he tilts his head upwards.

The boy flinches and backs up immediately, yanking them off to look at them. Fortunately, no blood has gotten into his eye because of the angle and their protection, but in that hasty movement some of the blood slides further down before he gets them off and streaks perfectly down the side of his face like a tear stain. He appears not to notice and looks up again from a safer distance. The next drip falls into the palm of his outstretched hand. Hannibal is put to mind of a supplicant at altar, Will’s expression one of the horror and awe which such imagery deserves.

So caught up is he in observing Will’s reaction that he misses the others’, Abigail already halfway up the steps, gun in hand, with Alana quickly on her heels before he bothers to look over at them. He should be up there with them so he can at least see their initial responses to the body itself.

Instead, he finds himself quite unwilling to move except to sacrifice yet another handkerchief and gently dab the blood from Will’s face. Will startles again at the contact but does not pull away from it, staring up at him, and Hannibal is careful to project only concern in his own expression as he presses fingertips to the boy’s cheek with the thin cloth between them.

A horrified gasp loud enough to be heard from the floor above draws Will’s focus away again. He turns away and climbs up the stairs, Hannibal following closely behind.

*

The transition from downstairs to up is like gliding into his very own homemade slice of unreality, so much like something out of one of his nightmares that Will curls his hand tightly into a fist, fingertips pressing against the center of his palm which is already sticky and stained. There’s a body in front of him and their blood is literally on his hands. It is both everything he expected and like nothing he imagined.

Dr. Bloom is on the phone with someone, probably more FBI, and Agent Hobbs has her weapon holstered, standing a little further into the room to take a closer look at the scene without touching anything. Will moves to do the same because he has to know, has to _see._

“That…that’s Marissa,” he whispers without meaning to say anything.

Hobbs looks to him, then back to the body before turning to face him and the psychiatrists again. “Alright, everybody back downstairs. Now.”

It’s a long, mostly silent wait after that for the rest of Abigail’s team to arrive. Will spends most of it watching the slow, steady drip from the ceiling, expressionless, measuring the time by the growing seconds between each fall. Large, warm hands gently tug the glasses from his hand at some point while he’s counting, and shortly after replace them perfectly clean back onto his face. Will blinks but is otherwise too numb to even be bothered that it makes him lose count because he doesn’t know if he missed another drip or if the seconds between have simply gotten longer while everything upstairs…congeals.

His hand does not receive the same treatment. The blood has gone tacky and flaky now and starts to itch. He rubs and taps it with his middle finger and only recognizes after his miscount that the pattern is vaguely similar to one he makes when he stims with his shirt. He keeps doing it.

With the crunch of many sets of tires over the leaves and gravel outside, Will shakes the cobwebs over his mind and his limbs loose. There is noise and bustle everywhere just as abruptly as there was nothing before, crawling over every inch of his skin and into his ears and his eyes and down his throat like a thousand agitated spiders. He stands, prepared to flee into the hush of the woods outside, albeit at a fairly sedate pace, but an African American man, tall and broad-shouldered, stands in his way. He’s talking, has _been_ talking to Will for he doesn’t know how long, and Will wants to crumple and cry and apologize because he can’t understand _anything_ the man is saying. He’s forgotten words, forgotten everything but the need for stillness and silence.

“He’s been like this since we discovered her,” Dr. Bloom says, and somehow those words make sense, maybe because her voice is already familiar and soothing and she’s so good at projecting outer calm that it’s easier to listen and actually hear.

The man’s frustration wanes into something a little more sympathetic, though he still frowns at Will like he’s trying to understand something. Will wants to care what it is he wants to know, but he just can’t bring himself to right now. The stranger lets Alana steer him gently outside.

“That still look like a cold-blooded killer to you, Jack?” Abigail asks once the door closes behind them. Jack sighs through his nose.

“I was with him all night,” Dr. Lecter speaks up. “And I am a very light sleeper, I would know if he had stirred. I assure you he could no more have done this than I.”

“This does certainly seem to eliminate the possibility that Will Graham is our Copycat,” Crawford agrees. In truth, he’s relieved even if it does leave open another loose end to the investigation. “But not the possibility that he knows him.”

“Katz should have a match for that tissue sample on Marissa Schurr’s gums within the hour,” says Abigail. “In the meanwhile, we have an APB out for Boyle. He’s the only known link between her and Cassie right now.”

“And what do we think are our chances that he’s really our guy?” Crawford asks as much of himself as the others, contemplative of what this new avenue of inquiry might mean.

“Perhaps your original theory was not so far off the mark,” Hannibal suggests. “The evidence, after all, shows that Garret Jacob Graham was very much of two minds concerning his only child. Wanting to keep him safe, protected, untouched by the horrors of the world and of his own nature, yet more than willing to tear him to pieces rather than ever allow him to leave.”

“Let’s not forget the obvious too. Graham gave every outward appearance of being supportive of Will’s identity, the name change, the hormones, all of it.” Abigail swallows. “Yet his victimology proves that he was anything but. Or at the very least, that he was struggling with it.”

“So maybe,” Jack continues the thread, warming to it more and more as they work it out together, “the murders were an outlet by which he tried to kill the idea of his daughter, in order to make room for his son. He would’ve wanted to share that with Will, some kind of…demented father and son bonding experience.” He shakes his head, hating all of the ugliness finally starting to take shape. “But doing so would’ve meant exposing Will to the crisis he was feeling and the secrets he’d kept from his family for years.”

“Nicholas Boyle would have been as much a surrogate for Will as those girls he killed,” Abigail finishes for him. There’s a conviction to her words that isn’t quite warranted until Katz gets them those DNA results, but her confidence isn’t so unwarranted when compared to the reliability of their close rate ever since she joined Jack’s team. She’ll have his job when he’s finally ready to retire in a few years. He intends to make damn sure of it.

“If it’s alright, Jack, I’d like to join Dr. Bloom in seeing to Will now.”

“I think that would be best,” Jack agrees and waves Dr. Lecter off. He and Abigail have a long night ahead of them with the rest of their team, but there’s no reason to keep a traumatized teenager and two psychiatrists out here longer than necessary. He can get the answers he needs from Graham later, after the poor kid snaps out of whatever funk he’s in, if they don’t get a lead on Boyle tonight. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all know what's about to happen next at the Grahams' house. :P What you _don't_ know is what's going to happen once they get back to Baltimore. ;)


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will's bad night is not over yet.

It is at Jack Crawford’s behest that they return to the Graham house to collect any necessary personal effects before Will Graham “leaves home for good,” as the man puts it. None of their party makes mention of the fact that Will has likely already taken it upon himself to retrieve whichever belongings he treasures most on their previous visit yesterday. At least it ensures there will be no inquiry into the missing items later. With Abigail remaining behind at the cabin with the other agents, Hannibal drives them this time while Alana retains her spot in the front passenger seat. There is little talking, Hannibal’s eyes kept to the darkened road ahead while Alana’s remain affixed for most of the ride on the rearview mirror, keeping vigilant watch on the still silent boy while Will appears not to notice, or pretends not to.

Word of the murder has already gotten out, and a veritable mob of reporters awaits their arrival. There are several uniformed officers keeping them at bay behind police lines as well, but both psychiatrists grimace all the same while Will seems to curl in on himself in the backseat even further. With a bit of coaxing from them, he breathes in deeply and visibly steels himself once more before the three of them get out of the car.

“Will! Did you know you were a cannibal?”

“Will Graham! Anything to say to the families of your father’s victims?”

“Will! What about the girl who was reported missing and found dead just hours ago? How well did you know her?”

“Will, is someone setting out to continue your father’s work? Are you worried that you’ll be next?”

“Hannah, do you regret your life choices now, knowing that they’ve led to the loss of so many other innocent young girls like yourself?”

At this question, Will stops, despite the urging of the officers behind them to continue on past the throng. “My choices had nothing to do with it,” he intones clearly, his first words spoken in hours. He doesn’t seem outwardly angry, likely due to their earlier shocking discovery leaving his expressions blank and curiously hollowed out. Whatever Will’s feelings on these questions and the events preceding them are, they are buried so deeply for the moment that even he may be unable to access them right now. “He was always going to kill those girls. It was in his nature.”

“And what of your nature then? How will you answer for that?”

Will turns away now as though bored, though it is again more likely that he is simply still in gradual recovery from earlier mental exhaustion, but Alana looks murderous enough and has since the rude individual uttered Will’s old name that Hannibal must place a hand on her shoulder to ensure she does nothing uncharacteristically foolish like attempt to assault the man in front of a crowd of other reporters. As they pass through, Hannibal makes note of the name on the man’s press badge, the network station listed underneath it unsurprisingly one known for its extreme conservative and morally dogmatic views.

Another unpleasant surprise awaits on the other side of the crowd, as Marissa Schurr’s mother comes running out from her own house, and Hannibal must grip her by the arms firmly but placatingly to keep her from pushing past him to get to Will. “Why? _Why her?_ You and Marissa weren’t even friends anymore, _why would—”_ The woman’s bitter ranting is broken by her own anguished sobs. Will’s face shows its first hint of true emotionality since the cabin, twisting into a look of discomfort and a brief flash of Mrs. Schurr’s own crippling grief.

A police officer comes to gently usher her away, yet they still have not even made it to the house before yet _another_ familiar face shows up on the wrong side of the police line, calling Will’s name. At least it is the correct one this time.

“Miss Lounds,” Hannibal greets in kind in Will’s stead. “Would I be correct in assuming we have you to thank for the truth of Will’s identity becoming public knowledge?” It would not be surprising to learn she had discovered it ahead of her peers. Repugnant though many of her methods are, Abigail had been right before to call her more resourceful than most other tabloid journalists.

“Would you have preferred the alternative?” Lounds quips in return, chin tilted upward almost defiantly. “Every blog, network, and newspaper across the country continuing to spread misinformation indefinitely. Because that wouldn’t have gotten frustrating or old to hear forever, now would it?” she asks, directing this last question rhetorically at Will.

“Yeah, you’re all heart, Freddie,” Alana sneers, clearly in no better mood since their encounter with the rest of the media circus. “Just looking out for Will’s best interests, of course.”

“I am,” Freddie says without a trace of irony, clearly goading the other woman.

“She’s kind of right,” Will mumbles to his feet. “If they’re all gonna hound me anyway, I’d rather know which ones are gonna be assholish enough to call me the wrong name on purpose.” Lounds turns a triumphant smirk to Alana, who reins in enough of her composure back not to give a reaction this time.

Another officer shows up to escort Ms. Lounds off the premises as well. “Will, you need me now more than ever,” she says as she’s steered away from the house. “I’m here for you whenever you’re ready to tell your side of the story.”

“Actually, you were just leaving,” Bloom mutters, apparently unable to resist one last little jibe. “Come on,” she says, gently guiding Will back towards the house again.

Before following them inside, Hannibal decides to ensure that Freddie Lounds does indeed leave the premises, and perhaps in doing so might be able to ask her a few questions of his own before she goes. After all, if she could skirt past the police lines so easily, who knows who or what else she might have spotted lurking in the shadowed eaves beside her?

*

Will doesn’t want to go back into that room again at night, with its now oppressively sterile air and memories of creaking floorboards outside his bedroom door. He’s already gotten everything that he really wanted, everything that can’t be eventually replaced, and everything else is just the dross and trappings of an old life that already feels distant and disconnected from him.

He doesn’t say as much to anyone, already not feeling much like talking again, and merely shakes his head when Dr. Bloom asks if there’s anything particular he wants them to look for while they’re there. She doesn’t seem surprised and Will doesn’t wonder about that maybe as much as he should, finds himself sitting alone on the couch a few minutes later after Dr. Lecter suggests they simply pack a small selection of books and clothing and subtly hints that two pairs of hands at the task will allow them to leave this place that much faster. Will appreciates that he is not expected to help, though he knows in the back of his mind that this is because Dr. Lecter likely thinks he would just be in the way right now. It also means that Will can be left alone for a breather without Dr. Bloom hovering and fussing uncertainly over him. While a part of him may secretly like that a little bit too, he still prefers overall to have his space.

His space might not prefer him though, given the way it presses in against him almost suffocatingly as soon as Bloom and Lecter are upstairs. There are too many antlers on all the walls of the house, on the embroidered designs on the pillows and furniture, he never noticed before how many, and all of them swim together now in sick shades of brown and grey and red until it is not the living room he’s standing in any longer but the antler room of his father’s cabin again, and Marissa Schurr is _drip, drip, dripping_ onto the floorboards and—completely left alone with her in his thoughts this time—Will’s inner voice doesn’t mind whispering sibilantly into his ear that she never looked so pretty and blissful and wise in life as she does in death.

Did they all look like that? They must have at some point, he muses as the imagery fades and leaves him sitting on the couch in his old living room again, but his father wouldn’t have lingered on that long enough to see it. He wouldn’t have paused to watch them bleed out into the basins below their feet, would have busied himself downstairs instead prepping for the next steps, never idle for a moment because Garret Jacob Graham couldn’t abide idleness without a purpose. Couldn’t abide art for art’s sake either, never saw the point if there wasn’t a clear rationale or message behind it. There’s a reason most of the warm, homey touches to the décor were Karen’s doing and the rest were all hunting trophies. Even the pillows…

Will’s attention hooks on that thought, and without questioning why he reaches back for the throw pillow wedged between him and the back of the couch and flips it up in his lap, interested not in the simple design embroidered in its middle but in the cross-stitched seam running along its side. He runs a finger idly over the raised crisscross pattern for a moment before pulling the knife he reclaimed yesterday from his pocket and flicking it open.

He doesn’t hear the sliding glass door behind him open, his concentration on the slow, careful rip he makes down the seam line. He almost has it completely open on one side.

The air shifts, making him shiver against the autumn chill creeping along the back of his neck. Will stiffens. Looks up.

“Please. You’ve gotta listen to me, man, I didn’t do anything—” Will reflexively throws the pillow at the intruder. Tufts of dark, curling hair spill and flutter out onto the floor, incongruously slow with the way Will bolts upright and moves towards the stairs for high ground while Boyle bats the pillow away and reaches out to grab him by the arm.

It is also reflex not to try yanking out of the other’s grip and risk injury to himself, to instead let himself be pulled in by the momentum and keep the blade in his hand steady and tilted upward and outward held out in front of him.

They are close enough to one another that it could almost be classified as an embrace, the grip on his arm tightening to bruising. Hot, sour breath tickles at his nose and fogs up his glasses. Will pulls the knife downward through flesh that parts for him like it was meant for it, twin expressions of horror and pain on both their faces that for Will is also tinged with something else, something sticky sweet and feral, bordering on jubilant.

Nicholas Boyle slides glassy eyed to the floor and Will falls down hard on his knees beside him, panting heavily.

*

“Did you hear that?” Alana asks, pausing in her movements with the duffel bag after they hear a curious thumping sound downstairs. “Hang on, I want to check on Will real quick. Be just a minute.” Rather than remain behind, Hannibal follows silently once she turns away and starts to head for the stairs.

The scent of blood and viscera reaches him faintly as they near the landing and Hannibal makes a quick decision, rushing up behind Alana before she has a chance to notice him and dashing her head against the wall with just enough gentle force to knock her unconscious. There is no noise downstairs to indicate anyone below has noticed.

Will does not look up as Hannibal approaches him, crouched over the body of Nicholas Boyle, its shirt slit open all the way to the collar just as an ER surgeon would do to expose the partially eviscerated torso. His hands, though a bit clumsy and amateurish as the carcass is that of a man and not a deer, have begun to make efficient progress towards butchering with a few well-made educated guesses as to where the incisions should be, only slightly off in a couple of places and already shaping into a design similar to the classic Y formation at autopsies that will allow him to reach in and crack the ribs open wide for better access.

The imagery before him would unsteady a lesser man, and even Hannibal must allow himself a moment to let it crystallize in his memory palace, lamenting only that the expression on Will’s face is not so much beatific as it is almost empty again, his movements as he works fairly mechanical and rote as he acts more on habit than conscious intention. There is a sort of beauty in that. He is only doing what he knows, as he has been taught. He could also be taught in time to remain present in the moment rather than become so lost in it he neglects his awareness of surroundings.

_“Will,”_ he says the boy’s name clearly and just sharply enough to garner his attention. That Will automatically stops what he’s doing to look up at the newcomer and brandish the tool in his hand threateningly is just one more detail to be charmed by when he has time to reflect upon it in his palace later.

He kneels at the other side of the body across from Will, easily catching the boy’s wrist in his grip when the knife lunges towards him. It is difficult not to meet that silent, savage snarl in front of him with a smile, to instead allow only some sternness and open friendly concern to shine through as he says Will’s name again.

“Think of where you are, of who you are,” he says. “This is not the time or place for what you are doing.” He glances down at the corpse between them, feeling the arm in his grip begin to weaken and sway a bit as Will starts to process his words and come back to himself. “This is not some field dressing out in the middle of the woods. Nor is it self-defense. You butchered this man, Will.”

Will is looking down at his own handiwork now with clearer eyes, horror mixed with awe and alarm bleeding into his expression. “I, _oh god,_ I didn’t. I don’t, I was just—”

“—Doing as you were conditioned to act in such a situation,” Hannibal finishes for him with an air of clinical detachment. The look Will gives him is scorching.

“I am _not_ like my father.”

“No,” Hannibal agrees. “You are better than him. You also have me now,” he says, reaching with his free hand to grip the back of Will’s neck, both a placation and a subtle suggestion to surrender and submit to him. Will meets his eyes and seems guilty with the recognition that he had also tried to attack Hannibal—not that Hannibal would ever fault him for his instincts, being naturally territorial over his kill and defensive against the sudden appearance of a witness—but the look is also a bit calculating and considering, and he can feel the boy’s grip on his knife tightening just the smallest amount. Hannibal couldn’t be prouder.

“There isn’t much time,” the man continues. “Dr. Bloom is indisposed but won’t remain so for long. If she sees this, she’ll call the officers outside for help.” The guilt in Will’s expression intensifies at the mention of Alana and he begins to shake softly. “Allow me to help you, Will. At great risk to my career and my life, I will, but you must decide now. You can try to explain what you’ve done here to them…or we can hide the body.”

He knows which it will be, but it is important to allow Will this illusion of choice. If he feels as though he has been pushed into doing something by the older man with no say of his own, it will only breed resentment later.

As predicted, it takes little time to decide before Will, still trembling and blinking to hold back unwanted tears, gives Hannibal a rapid little nod as his answer.

*

“Dad would hate this,” Will murmurs much later into the silence of the car. The body has been taken care of, the FBI told some deft lies and half-truths about a “confrontation” back at the house to explain away the trace amounts of blood that couldn’t be cleaned up in their hurry, and they are on their way back now to the same hotel they stayed at last night, since the flight back to Maryland had to be rescheduled hours ago after Marissa’s discovery. Agent Hobbs will likely be kept out working even later tonight and Dr. Bloom will stay out with her in support. Will feels guiltier about that than he does about the death, and knowing _that_ sits a little uneasily with him.

“We did not honor every part of him,” Lecter says, picking up on exactly what Will means. “Which according to your father’s philosophy would be abhorrently wasteful. I don’t know about you, but I’m sure I could not stomach the taste of unwashed ginger even to assuage a guilty conscience.”

Will doesn’t _quite_ laugh, too tired for it, but his face spasms briefly into a rictus smile. Macabre humor again, he and Abigail aren’t the only ones with a talent for it apparently. “He’d say that makes it murder but…he really was just crazy, wasn’t he?” Will asks, not sure if it’s rhetorical or if he’s actually seeking confirmation. “That was an excuse he made up because otherwise he’d have to live with himself and what he, what he did.”

Dr. Lecter smiles at him approvingly, like a teacher proud that their student figured out the answer to their own question in the middle of class. Will never really liked any of his teachers, but seeing it there makes him feel a little wobbly and strange and he doesn’t know what expression he’s making in response, just knows that he has to bite his lip and turn his head away to hide it. “You are right. He could not face the truth of who he was, but you don’t have that same problem, do you, Will?” Will shakes his head.

“Not anymore,” he says, looking out into the darkness through his window. He feels somewhat adrift, alone out in that darkness.

“You are not alone, Will.” Will manages not to startle, but only just. Did he speak aloud or is the doctor just that scarily in sync with the train of his thoughts? Which is worse?

One of Lecter’s hands leaves the steering wheel to settle lightly on top of Will’s, which is resting loose and half-curled against his thigh. He does this a lot. Will has noticed. Little touches. Never improper, but always somehow more significant than a similar touch from Bloom or Hobbs, always more frequent, and Will in giddy embarrassment can perfectly recall and recount every single one from the last couple of days.

“I am right here beside you.” Will doesn’t say anything to that, but he does bite his lip again and, feeling incredibly daring, lets one of his fingers twitch a little bit to brush up against the wider ones clasped over his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter, a conversation between Will and Hannibal in his office about murder and secrets that might go _just a smidge_ differently than in canon. ;)


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our resident teenager thinks perhaps a little too much with his hormones and not enough with his brain, but is still smart enough to hit the right marks on a couple of key points.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I mention this fic wasn't going to be anywhere _nearly_ as slow burn as Fairy's Bride? If not, consider this your head's up. ;)

“Hello, Will.” The boy sitting against the bookshelves is not surprised at having been caught lurking around on the office balcony where he doesn’t belong. The psychiatrist strikes him as the sort of person who would be too keenly aware of his surroundings most of the time, and especially within his own comfortable spaces, to be snuck up on so easily.

“Hi, Doctor Lecter,” he returns shyly. The doctor smiles up at him and Will feels the corners of his mouth tug helplessly in response to that too. He normally doesn’t _like_ reflecting back at people, but it’s sort of nice with Dr. Lecter. Instead of being pulled into thoughts and assertions and experiences not his own, he often feels calmer, more centered, more _himself_ somehow whenever he locks eyes with the older man.

“Won’t you come down? You can tell me what’s on your mind this evening that’s brought you here.”

“I can do that from up here too,” Will points out, smiling wider, but he’s already getting up and turning around to make the climb back down.

Dr. Lecter is there as he nears the bottom to help him hop down from the final rungs. He ends up hopping a little too early and energetically, making the supportive arms that come around him a necessity rather than a precaution as he loses his balance enough to sway and fall against the man’s chest before he is righted again.

Dr. Lecter chuckles silently, eyes crinkling as he helps Will to properly stand on his own, so Will grins back and is a little too pleased to be as embarrassed as he probably should be. Even he can’t say for sure whether it was entirely an accident or not.

He manages not to feel too bereft when Dr. Lecter releases him and places a small, respectful distance between them again, hovering right along the edge of Will’s personal space bubble. “Did you wish to discuss what happened with Nicholas Boyle?”

Will blinks back at him in surprise. He hadn’t expected to be asked that in such a forthright manner. “I…” He _hadn’t_ come to talk about that, not really. Should he have? He shakes his head, not so much trying to refute the question as unsure what he’s supposed to say.

“It’s alright. I think it would be good for you to talk it out with someone, Will. That person cannot be your therapist, since Dr. Bloom must not know about what you did, but that is why it is your good fortune the only individual in on your secret is me,” says Dr. Lecter, winking as he had when he poured Will that Scotch and Coke the other night and told him that would be their little secret too.

Will swallows, throat burning a little. He almost wishes Dr. Lecter would offer him another drink like that now. “You don’t seem upset about it. About what I did.”

“And why would I? He meant you harm, Will. He might have killed you had you not killed him first.”

“He might not have,” Will points out, biting his lip. “I don’t know. I guess we’ll never know, now.”

“No sense dwelling on what he may or may not have intended when he showed up that night then.” Dr. Lecter looks at him shrewdly. “You know now the unreality of people who die. You understand that they are not flesh, but light and air and color.”

“Quick sounds quickly ended when you change them,” Will mutters. He wanders about the room a bit, feeling Dr. Lecter’s gaze following him like a tether, his own gaze landing on nothing in particular. He already took the time to look around before “hiding” up on the balcony. “It didn’t feel unreal to me though, it was more…more _hyperreal._ Like nothing that ever came before.” He stops pacing to lean against Lecter’s desk.

“Did you feel a sprig of zest in your step when you killed Nicholas Boyle?” the psychiatrist asks him without judgement.

He nods. “I felt powerful.” Will looks down at his own hands and swallows. “I know I was acting…weird, when you found me. I don’t know when I would have snapped out of it, when I would have stopped if I was alone in the house with no one to interrupt me. Maybe when some of the meat was already sizzling in the pan.” He gives a grim, helpless little laugh. “I’m not sure I would’ve even been able to tell the difference between it and regular pork to be honest. It’s not like I noticed after all when Dad first moved us onto the long pig diet.”

Hannibal hums consideringly. “Perhaps that palate of yours is something we’ll need to work on.” Will titters more genuinely this time. How had he never noticed before that night just how _funny_ Dr. Lecter could be? “Is there anything else you would like to address now, since you did not arrive prepared to have this conversation in particular as I had originally assumed?”

Will realizes this is the closest he’s ever going to get to an engraved invitation to ask what he really had wanted to talk about, the other elephant in the room they’ve only tiptoed around so far. He thinks now that Dr. Lecter may have wanted to talk about Nicholas Boyle first as a sort of quid pro quo between them. “Yeah. I…I thought about it a lot, before, and I think I figured it out finally when I saw how you were looking at me after I, um, butchered Nicholas, but I want to hear it from you before I tell you what I think.” He breathes raggedly in, more nervous suddenly than he had been discussing his own cold-blooded murder. He makes sure to maintain steady eye contact when he asks, “Why did you call the house that morning?”

“To ascertain if your father was available for an interview that day, as I said.” Dr. Lecter is understandably cautious, careful in his wording as Will might expect, but what he adds next is not what Will expected at all. “I was inexperienced with the standard protocols of police procedure and made a mistake. Something that might be easily misconstrued, not unlike yourself.”

“That’s not…no. _No.”_ Will straightens rigidly, shifting from flabbergasted to furious in the blink of an eye. “I didn’t ask you to feed me the bullshit excuse you’d give Agent Hobbs or her boss if one of them found out, Dr. Lecter,” he snaps. “I asked you expecting the same honesty you demanded of me about killing Nick Boyle. Why are you _lying?”_

“What is it you want me to say, Will?” The heavy glass paperweight he hadn’t even been conscious of fondling as they conversed is sent flying out of Will’s hand before the man has finished speaking. Hannibal dodges the projectile and it lands harmlessly on the floor with a sharp, sickening crack.

“Don’t lie to me!” Will feels a roiling, twisted thrill in his gut not unlike the feel of his hunting knife slicing through Nicholas Boyle’s belly. He really hadn’t meant to do that. Fuck, that was probably something expensive and he _likes_ Dr. Lecter, enough to want the other man to like him back, but at the same time that had also felt too good for him to stop there if his crush is going to continue to be an ass. “Not to me.”

Hannibal eyes the cracked paperweight for a long moment before shifting his focus back up to meet Will’s gaze. There’s something _there_ in the abyss of his eyes looking back into Will’s soul that sends a strange frission of both fear and pleasure up the boy’s spine. “What an impulsive creature you are, Will Graham.”

Will resists the impulse now screaming at him to bolt, choosing instead to keep still and continue maintaining eye contact as the older man inches nearer. “Do you not want to tell me because you think I’ll be mad? I should be mad, but I’m not. Know why?” he asks, aware that he’s getting kind of babbly as Lecter comes closer. “Because I know if it wasn’t you calling, it would’ve been something else later anyway, like a real telemarketer calling or…or something else really innocuous and random that would have set him off eventually. You didn’t _change_ anything. Dad was always going to snap. Mom was always going to die. I already knew that. I knew she was never getting out of that house alive as soon as I figured out what happened to my birth mom. Didn’t think I was going to make it out either until…” He stops talking to make a quick, quiet sound like a small explosion with his mouth, miming an eruption coming out of the side of his head with one hand.

Dr. Lecter has stopped just a few feet away from him, the corner of his mouth quirking up at Will’s cartoonish reenactment of his father’s violent end. His eyes are still dark, mostly with intrigue and just a small hint of danger. “Won’t you tell me what you believe is the reason I made the call so that I may either confirm or deny it? I promise not to lie.”

Will reaches behind himself, making it a point not to look away from Hannibal even to glance at what he’s touching as he methodically tips the first object his hand comes into contact with over the edge and lets it crash to the floor. “Just did,” he says, giving a tiny smirk that belies the thrill shooting through him again as he watches Hannibal watch him do it without making any attempt to stop him. If he doesn’t get it, then he’s not the man Will thought he was, plain and simple.

“That was not impulsive,” Lecter observes with a flicker of recognition and understanding crossing his features, “but calculated and designed to provoke. You want a reaction.”

“I want to _see_ you.” Will reaches back again and finds a book this time, some sort of leatherbound journal. He pulls it into his lap and flips it open to a random page, one with a list of names and times penned in an elegant hand, poised to rip it down the middle.

A hand comes to rest atop his clenched fingers and Will nearly embarrasses himself by whimpering, stopping the sound from escaping just in time. “Not that, please,” the doctor says mildly, as if the delicate and likely valuable and irreplaceable curios Will has already broken mean nothing, but messing up his daily appointment planner is a step too far. “I was curious as well, what would happen,” he finally admits. That’s all Will has wanted to hear him say.

His fingers clench again anyway, preparing to tear the page out. He’s still curious himself after all.

Hannibal’s hand tightens around his, _just_ bordering on this side of painful. “Let it go, Will.” His tone and expression don’t change, but there is that _something_ again to the way he says it that makes those tingly hot and cold shivers come back. Will releases the page and loosens his other hand as well, allowing Hannibal to pluck the book from his fingers and set it back on the desk behind him.

“Very good,” the doctor praises with his hand still around Will’s, and him still leaning fractionally closer into Will’s space to set the book aside. Heat pools in Will’s gut and before he quite knows what he’s doing, he leans up and clumsily presses his mouth against Doctor Lecter’s.

The lips against his own are almost surprisingly soft and warm, but unresponsive. After barely more than a second, _two_ maybe, Will pulls back, flushing all over and babbling inane apologies even he can’t keep track of for how quickly and incoherently they come tumbling out of his mouth all at once.

Dr. Lecter stops him talking with the gentle press of his thumb against Will’s bottom lip, his other hand _still_ holding onto Will’s. Will can’t get a good enough read on his face even from this close to tell what he’s thinking. “Brash boy,” Hannibal calls him, and Will doesn’t understand why the admonishment that isn’t _quite_ scolding only makes him flush harder.

“You realize it would be highly inappropriate of me for a number of reasons to reward or encourage this type of behavior, Will,” he murmurs, fingers curled under the boy’s chin while his thumb rubs gently over the seam of his mouth until his lips part and Will is a confused, panting, shuddering mess from all the mixed signals.

“That’s…that’s not actually a no,” he pieces together even after focusing for a moment on just the words themselves. Hard to concentrate or get the words out with that thumb still resting on its new favorite perch. “You’re not actually saying you _don’t_ want me.” His lips brush against the pad of Hannibal’s thumb as he speaks. The man presses it harder against his bottom lip, hard enough for it to plump out and redden a little from the pressure, the appendage slipping in just enough to scrape against his teeth and touch his tongue, and on instinct Will clamps his lips shut around just the tip of it and suckles lightly.

Hannibal removes the thumb from Will’s mouth and takes his whole hand back with a soft hiss of breath, looking just a bit less composed than he had before, though that’s nothing to how Will must look, all flushed and bereft and embarrassed and weirdly proud all at once. _“Impetuous boy,”_ the man standing over him says in echo of his earlier words, nostrils flaring, his hypnotic accent a shade thicker than normal.

He takes a step back, allowing them both space to breathe. It’s impossible to tell which Will feels more about that, disappointed or relieved. Mostly, he’s still a little lost and unsure where they stand with one another as of right this moment. It doesn’t feel entirely safe to try to ask again just yet.

What confuses him even further is how sedately Dr. Lecter speaks when they’re both calm and clear-headed once more—“We should get you back to Port Haven, before someone at the hospital puts out an alert to report you as missing.”—as if they’re seriously going to pretend that nothing just happened, only for the man to then put a hand on the small of Will’s back as they exit the office that feels like a burning brand through his clothes, as though he is being marked. The way his touch lingers just as much as usual, maybe even more so, as Will is eased into the front passenger seat of Dr. Lecter’s Bentley.

The way Dr. Lecter’s inscrutable gaze lingers on Will as he gets dropped off and disappears down the hallway to his room with a pair of flustered nurses who had only just noticed his absence right as he got back, gently chiding him and chattering to each other over his head, utterly oblivious to anything going on between their charge and the kind doctor they just thanked for his safe return.

Later, lying in bed in his soft favorite shirt while listening to music on his “new” iPod and fidgeting idly with the cube toy in his hand, Will still has no clear answer, only the lingering memory of every look and touch that has passed between them tonight. He fidgets restlessly with his whole body, not just with his hands, his muscles flexing, thighs twitching.

He ghosts a finger over his bottom lip and lets out a shaky sigh before pressing down, trying to recall the exact pressure of a thick, slightly callused thumb. He wonders why Dr. Lecter’s hands have calluses, albeit barely noticeable ones. Maybe the man plays a musical instrument, or has some other hobbies that require lots of work with his hands.

He hums around the fingers that are now in his mouth, twisting his head around and impatiently pawing one of the earbuds out with the back of his other hand so he can better make out the remembered shape of Dr. Lecter’s words, _“What an impulsive creature you are.”_ Thinks about how the doctor can say some of the most absurd things in the most ridiculous ways and not sound absurd or ridiculous saying them at all.

He sucks harder around his fingers, thighs clenching inward once more as he lifts his knees to kick away the insufferably hot bedsheets. His currently _useless_ extra hand clenches tightly around the fidget cube too before he remembers he can let go and drops the thing on his pillow somewhere by his head. The hand snakes down to lift up the waistband of his pajama bottoms and allow the other one easier access to its destination.

He gasps at the lightest press of contact, already _so, so stimulated_ and overheated thinking about Dr. Lecter’s hand on his back, Dr. Lecter’s hand on his face, Dr. Lecter’s arms around him when he jumped down from the ladder. Dr. Lecter’s mouth forming around the words, _“Impetuous boy, cunning and clever boy, curious creature,”_ before leaning in to claim his own.

His main hand runs featherlight touches over his cock which grow increasingly faster and firmer and more frantic while his other hand rucks up his soft shirt to brush softer skin Dr. Lecter has never touched but maybe, _just maybe,_ someday he might. Perhaps sooner rather than later if Will asks him nicely enough, or breaks more of his things.

Will thinks about how Dr. Lecter says his name, his name that he chose for himself, _“Will, Will, Will,”_ more than anyone else Will has ever met, like it’s his absolute favorite word in the entire world. He thinks about it while rolling his fingers more insistently around his penis, the sensitive, slightly elongated nub directly above his front hole. Dips his fingers inside there for more wetness when the saliva runs tacky and dry, then gets the brilliant idea to lick his palm and dip those fingers back in so he can hump into them and grind up against the wet flat of his hand at the same time.

His other hand comes into play more directly now as the first one starts to get tired. He twists his neck at a terrible angle he’ll likely regret later to muffle the noises he’s making against the pillow as both of those hands work him over now, one of them pumping into him with as many fingers as will comfortably fit at once while the other resumes tugging and pulling at his dick. His thighs shake with the exertion, tingles running all the way down his legs that cause rapid, tiny little taps of his foot against the mattress. He wonders what Dr. Lecter would think if he could see him like this, tossing himself repeatedly against the edges of his own orgasm to the point where he’s almost overstimulated to the point of painful while at the same time never wanting it to end.

It is to the imagined feel of lips on his ear praising him for being _“very good”_ and telling him that he can _“let go now”_ that Will finally comes.

He gets up after several minutes of worn out panting, shucking out of his bunched up sleep pants and peeling off the sweaty shirt so he can leave it to air dry on top of the covers, and pads softly into the private bathroom adjoining his room (a surprising luxury in such a facility he has never appreciated more than as of this moment) to clean up and wash his hands. When he gets back, he finds where the fidget cube rolled off to under his pillow and sets it and his iPod back on the nightstand before climbing back into bed.

He drifts, imagining that somewhere else in Baltimore it’s possible Hannibal Lecter is getting ready for bed at the same time, stepping out of his own adjoining bathroom to shut off the lights and lay back against his own pillow under his own covers. He worries that he might be getting a tad fixated before deciding in his pleasant, bone-deep exhaustion that there’s nothing he can do about it now anyway if he is and maybe that’s just fine.

Sleepily, he dreams of stars and fated palaces, and the solid, reassuring click of a bolt sliding home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "There goes Will Graham, someone with good taste, a good stable head on his shoulders, and good decision-making skills," said no one ever.


End file.
